


Triage

by aeraecura



Series: Generation Loss [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gen, Medical Experimentation, Post-Undertale Neutral Route - Near Genocide Ending, angst as far as the eye can see, the friendly fanfic where everybody gets precisely what they wanted, the mildest of body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-01 08:52:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 61,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13994790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeraecura/pseuds/aeraecura
Summary: Dr. Alphys made a terrible mistake. Queen Alphys made it again, hoping for a better outcome.There might be a word for that.





	1. This Burning Feeling

ENTRY NUMBER 12:

* Determination.   
* The will to survive in the face of certain death.  
* It makes human SOULs powerful, but monsters cannot tolerate it for long.  
* I'm not powerful.  
* I'm not a good queen.  
* But maybe my determination will be enough...

* * *

The bottom of the washbasin was coated in gray sludge, making Alphys' hands itch where the soggy dust accumulated between her fingers.

She gave the filter pad one last rinse before squeezing it out, clear water falling in blobs that left little clean spots where they landed. Then she set the pad aside, rinsed off her hands, and twisted the faucet.

Behind her back, the creature in the tank watched. Its gaze followed her each time she shifted in place, tracking her movement from the sink to the tank's side to the ladder beside the tank. The ladder creaked as she climbed up, and the ceiling lights buzzed and clicked, evidence of faulty wiring that she was never, ever going to bother fixing. There was no other sound.

"Do you want me to not do this? B-because you might change your mind about that in about t-two days," Alphys said as she snapped the filter's casing shut again, foam pad firmly wedged back into place. The question came out sounding wrong to her and she giggled to cover it up, then felt even more awkward and stopped.

The monster in the tank showed precisely zero interest in whatever she was saying, turning to face the wall as she climbed back down. It was hugging itself, hunched over as if to avoid notice, a posture more reminiscent of the lone aquatic Amalgamate rather than the monster this was supposed to be. She tried not to think about what that meant, if anything.

Alphys dried off her hands and unrolled the sleeves of her robe, retrieving a pen from the mug on the counter so she could mark off the day's date. She scratched out a check mark, looked back over the chart to make sure everything was in order, the clicked the pen and dropped it back into the empty mug where it had been sitting. And then there was nothing else for her to do here, no reason to hang around. There were quite a few reasons for her  _not_ to linger, as the calendar function on her phone would all too readily remind her. But it was hard to see any of those things as important.

After all, the rest of the Underground would still be there when she came back. It would always be there.

Alphys circled the tank and knelt, positioning herself as close to the other monster's line of sight as possible without literally jumping in. With the haze of dust fading from around her patient's body, she could see where the pinpoint of light from its eye reflected against the glass. She rested one hand against the tank's side and waited, resisting the temptation to knock on it just for a reaction. Best not to be any more annoying than she had to be. Between the tank and the injections that were obviously painful but nonetheless necessary to keep the monster alive, it... well, it already had reason not to like her very much.

No response.

She let her hand slide down to rest on her lap.

"Um. I'll be back in a few hours, okay?"

When enough time passed to indicate that she wasn't going to get an answer, and wouldn't have gotten one even if her friend could hear her, Alphys left.

Theoretically, she could've hooked up a SOUL monitor to the tank alongside the filter and temperature gauge and salinity meter, like the kind they had in hospitals. It wasn't like she resented having to check in on her friend throughout the day, much the opposite, but it might have given her some peace of mind when she needed to be elsewhere. Only she'd tried setting one up weeks ago, when it still seemed like everything would turn out okay, and it hadn't worked. The machine always freaked out back when she'd tried using it on the Amalgamates, and this time it hadn't responded to her patient at all, even with the sensitivity cranked up as high as it would go. Which was an inconvenience, and possibly a little dangerous, but still made Alphys smile a little.

Of course Undyne would find some completely new way of accidentally breaking something. Of course.

* * *

Alphys departed the lab and headed for the nearest elevator at an awkward half-jog, having no need to put up any pretense of normalcy while totally alone. Hotland had suffered the greatest numerical loss of population when the human came, which had the small not-quite-benefit of minimizing the chance of any locals wondering why she was spending so much time in her old lab. And there wasn't a royal scientist around to wonder either, because she hadn't appointed one—a decision based less on a predicted need for secrecy, and more on the fact that she saw no reason to bother.

The joys of being in charge. And all it took was the near-destruction of a whole civilization, the murder of nearly everyone she loved, and the casual obliteration of monsterkind's hopes and dreams. Hooray.

She slowed to a walk after exiting the elevator, giving her time to register the presence of a small visitor on the doorstep of New Home. It was a moth-monster, maybe a third the size of Alphys herself, rolling a round metal knight's helmet between their hands. As she came closer, they slipped the helmet on and buzzed over to meet her, filling Alphys with mild dread. She wasn't a borderline-clairvoyant like Sans, but experience (plus her old friend named "anxiety", who the human had wounded but not _quite_ killed) told her that this would not be a fun conversation. People generally didn't hang around outside of your house so they could tell you how happy they were with life.

She smiled pleasantly and clasped her hands behind her back, where they couldn't see her digging her claws into her wrist. "Hello there! Ahh, how are you?"

The moth hovered like a little toy dangling from a string, translucent wings blurring to keep them in place. "Greetings. Your majesty, I need to speak with you."

Her smile remained bolted in place. "Okay, though um, firstly! You really don't need to call me that, 'Alphys' is fine. And um, of course we can, but if it isn't REALLY urgent then maybe you can—"

"My sibling Fell Down."

"...Oh."

Alphys' heart sank, but she quickly reshuffled her schedule in her head. Anyone who wanted to talk to her was supposed to at least call ahead, but sometimes they didn't and sometimes it was because of this. Those  _sometimes_ -es were getting more more frequent, though, and that wasn't just her anxiety talking. She'd calculated.

Well, it looked like those issues with broken puzzles in the Core would need to wait a bit longer.

"Um, how about you wait for me at the table?" she said, sidling around the small monster to open the front door. "I just need a minute, and then we can talk."

She pulled the door shut after politely shooing her guest in, and grimaced. Her social skills had improved since her coronation, phone calls included, but in the same way that tossing somebody into a lake made them a better swimmer. She could still feel the claw-marks on her wrist.

With no further ado, she switched her phone back on and dialed.

 

 

The moth monster had perched on the back of a chair, but fluttered over to pull another out for Alphys as she followed it into the house. It was an unexpectedly polite gesture that accomplished literally nothing, since all the furniture was made for boss monsters and weighed exactly as much as one would anticipate. Redecorating had been pretty low on the list of priorities when she'd first moved in, and now it just felt wrong to change anything about what had been Asgore's home.

She waved her visitor aside before they hurt themselves, feeling weirdly inadequate.

"Do you want anything to drink? I have soda, or I could make some tea."

"No thank you," they said as they settled back down, smoothing out the hem of their poofy dress with both hands. Lacking either boss monster-sized legs or cutesy little fairy wings, Alphys clambered into her seat with considerably less poise.

"So, you, um..." Alphys began, squirming around to get herself situated. It was hard to look dignified or serious with her feet dangling about a yard off the floor, but she did her best. Historically, her best was never very good, but no matter. "You said that your sibling fell. I'm sorry. How long ago did this happen?"

Their head was downturned, but their helmet still covered any further expression. Alphys wondered if it was too late to ask them to take that thing off, before concluding that the answer was a probable  _yes_. "It was this morning." Their tiny fingers dug into the fabric of their skirt, black gloves starkly visible against white. Alphys had to lean in to hear properly. "You may not remember either of us, but our elder sibling Fell Down as well. You revived them."

"Oh! Th-that would be Reaper Bird, right?" Alphys asked, the question coming out  _way_ too chirpy given the topic. Though she wasn't going to admit it, the monster was right about one thing: she had absolutely no idea who they were, much less the sibling who wasn't Reaper Bird. She'd most likely seen them both during the evacuation, if only in passing, but names and faces had been the last thing on her mind...

The moth monster nodded, talking faster, as if they'd rehearsed their little speech beforehand. It was a weird thought—and a  _little_ gratifying, if she was really being honest, but mostly just weird.

"I mention that because... I want you to help my younger sibling as well. I know what you can do, and what it will mean. I know that Lace won't be the same. But they will be alive, and, and that is the only thing that matters. I don't know what I could do for you in return, but..."

...But they would do anything to get what they thought they wanted.

Alphys nodded, adjusting her glasses as an excuse to avoid eye contact in the moment it took to adopt what she  _hoped_ was an expression of purehearted sympathy. It would be so easy to explain to this monster how little they understood what they were asking for, and maybe she was brave enough now to actually tell them, but she wasn't lying for her own sake. Not this time.

"I'm sorry about what happened to your sibling," Alphys said carefully, lacing her fingers together as they rested against the table. "And I'd really like to help! But, ahh, you see... in the experiment that reawakened your older sibling... the one that became part of Reaper Bird... I used a substance that came from the human SOULs. Now that they're all gone, I can't get any more."

The moth monster took this in, and for a brief moment, she thought that maybe they'd just accept the explanation and go no farther. Some monsters did. "And it's... all gone."

"Y-yep."

For the second time that day, Alphys felt as though someone was trying to look right through her. She regretted not asking the moth to take off that stupid helmet so at least they'd be on even ground. "If another human fell into the Underground, then things might be different," she added, just to say something more. "But otherwise, I can't help you."

"But you were the royal scientist. There could be something else—you might have had other ideas, ones that you never tried. If something went wrong, no one could hold it against you. I only ask that you try."

"That isn't really how it... works," Alphys said, inwardly cringing at how uncertain she sounded.  _She_ was supposed to be the one in charge here, and technically the Determination experiments were all common knowledge now, anyway. "The purpose was never to— I, I mean, I'm glad that Reaper Bird and everybody is okay, that's a good thing! But reawakening monsters was n-never the goal of my work. Um. Remember? Since you guys kind of... all agreed to... let me do stuff and then... g-g-give you b-back the dust, afterward..."

Alphys trailed off, and wondered if Sans might magically show up and rescue her if she screamed loud enough inside her head. Actual telepathy existed only in anime, and even if it didn't then Sans would still be unlikely to offer help here, but a lizard-girl could dream.

"Um. If you want someone to help take care of your sibling, or something like that, I could help arrange that?" Alphys said. "But otherwise, there's not really anything I can do."

"'Not really'?" the moth monster repeated. Their voice sounded funny, and not only because it was slightly muffled.

"I mean, there isn't... I c-can't. And it wouldn't be ethical anyway, j-just trying to do something that I know won't help..."

They nodded, after what felt like a very long time. "I see."

The moth monster—whose name she  _still_  couldn't remember— stood up, still balanced on the back of their chair, and hopped backwards. They hovered in place behind it, shiny little wings humming. "I apologize for bothering you, your highness. I won't need any help, then."

The cold in that teeny little bug voice might have gotten to Alphys, except that its owner immediately proceeded to struggle with the window-latch while trying to leave, forcing Alphys to go over help get it open. In fairness, it was big and heavy just like everything else in the house.

Which didn't stop Alphys from bursting into mildly-hysterical giggles as soon as they were out of sight, pressing her hand over her mouth in the off-chance that Sans was hiding out in the kitchen or napping or something, and close enough to overhear her.

If somebody told Alphys a year ago that people would not only crown her as their queen after seeing what she'd done to their loved ones, but  _beg_ her to do it all over again, she... well firstly, she would've panicked, but she also wouldn't have believed a word. And now here they all were. She couldn't even plead ignorance this time.

The moment passed, and her hand slid down from her mouth to the thin cord around her neck, tracing it down the hard tube-shape pressed between her robe and the scales on her upper chest. The glass felt warm, even through the thick fabric. It always did. Carrying her full supply of Determination around like this would be neither sane nor practical, but she'd kept one vial on her person ever since she'd nearly lost Undyne for a second time. It served well as both a safety precaution and a reminder.

Priorities.

Alphys felt around in her pocket once more, retrieving her phone to quickly type out a note to herself:  _whimsun (Lace), s=?, g=they/them, age= YA or less??, fallen=TODAY._

Later, before returning to the lab for the night, she would have to fill the gaps in her info and then copy it over to the spreadsheet she'd been keeping. (The morbid fact that there were enough monsters Falling in a short enough span for her to notice despite her own distractions, but few enough for her to track the number more or less by hand, was not lost on her.) And she would need to follow up with the monster who'd just left, whose name she'd  _stupidly_ forgotten to even ask. She couldn't afford to do what they'd asked of her, but it was only right to try and make sure they were relatively okay. She owed them that much, at least.

* * *

* * *

After the yellow monster went away,         floated on its back at the surface of the water, within reach of the metal grating separating the inside of the tank from the rest of the room.

Its eye was open. The dark silhouette of the grating cut through the dim green glow shining down from the ceiling. The weak light reflected off the water and flickered along the wall, at the very bottom edge of its field of vision. There were other things in the room, visible through the glass walls if          turned its head, but they were too blurry and indistinct to make out at this distance.

It saw all these things, took them in, drifted.

There was the constant gurgle of water lapping against its ears, a low humming noise, and a faint off-key whine from overhead that got on its nerves. The water felt like nothing at all, but being half-exposed to the air left          body feeling heavy, under a constant pressure, the way it might feel while diving down too far. The tank was not very big, and it had no clear memories of being anywhere else, but it did not wonder about this.

It heard, and felt, but didn't wonder about much of anything.

 

Time passed. There was no way to measure this time and no reason to care, with nothing to do in the present or look forward to in the future. The yellow monster might appear again, or maybe the little flower, and they would say or do things, but then they would leave again and there would be nothing left but water and dim light.        existed.

And existed.

And went on existing.

 

The sensation of weight slowly increased, as if the air itself was pressing down against       's chest, tightening around its throat like a hand. It choked and coughed, doubling over and slipping deeper down into the water, sinking. Reflexively it tried to breathe in again and succeeded only in filling its lungs with gritty-tasting water, which made it try to cough even more, which did nothing.

The urge to keep coughing eventually subsided, as did the feeling of pressure now that       was back underwater. Its chest still felt tight, which might have been related to the funny bubbling feeling inside there. Not painful, just unfamiliar. And then time passed, an amount of time for which        did not have any word to describe, and then the feeling was no longer unfamiliar. Just... there.

        allowed itself to sink more, until it came to rest against the hard smooth floor of the tank where bits of gray dust had settled. There was even less to see or hear than at the surface, with the water distorting all sound and blocking out much of what little light had been visible.        twisted its head to try and see out through the glass, then lost interest and slumped. Its gills quietly fluttered away.

 

 Maybe it was the bubbling-tickling feeling inside of its chest, or maybe the near-complete sensory deprivation in the floor of the tank, but         had a dim sense, however briefly, that something wasn't right. That it should have been somewhere else, doing something else, should have been  _different_ somehow. But it didn't have the words to take that thought any further or develop it into anything beyond a feeling. A question, maybe. Even if it did, there was no one around to ask.

And so the moment passed.

 

By the time Alphys returned, later that night, the creature in the tank remembered nothing.


	2. Your Best Friend

ENTRY NUMBER 03:                          

* Any human entering the Underground will be closely monitored.  
* Emergency evacuations procedures will begin.  
* The human will be detained.  
* Reaching the surface isn’t a realistic goal, but the SOUL will still be useful.

ENTRY NUMBER 04:

* But…  
* I can’t rely solely on traps or puzzles.  
* For the plan to be feasible, I would need to establish a new royal guard.  
*…Which means putting monsters in harm’s way.  
* I don’t want any more dust on my hands.

* * *

 The floor vibrated whenever the elevator moved. Flowey’s roots were sensitive enough to detect it from below the lobby, rousing him from his doze. Alphys had taken a little longer than usual.

He waited for the elevator to stop, then popped up between a seam in the floor-tiles for a look around. There was hardly anything Alphys could do if she found him here, but she might get annoying if he showed up at the wrong time; he already knew how she reacted to people threatening her pet/girlfriend (badly) and no longer found it interesting enough to put that scenario into motion again.

Flowey dug back down and burrowed deeper into the lab, this time following the steadily hiss-hum of the water pipes. Traveling blindly used to disorient him, but with enough practice he could move faster than he did when he had legs. Getting to ignore walls had its convenient points.

The fish was curled up as far into the corner of the tank as physiologically possible, an effort helped by the fact that her body had roughly the consistency of ice cream dropped into the dirt and left to melt. “Hiya, stupid!” he called out, waving with a leaf. The fish didn’t notice the motion, mostly because she had her head down and clutched under her arms, but she didn’t respond when a vine then sprouted up and tapped against the glass either. Flowey pondered this, then mentally shrugged and turned his attention towards the countertop on the opposite side of the room, feeling around with the vine for the clipboard Alphys had left up there.

You’d think that Flowey would know more about Determination than anybody else, and mostly you would be right, but Alphys’ records here didn’t really make much sense. The pages were covered in printed columns and boxes filled in with decimal numbers which he sort of understood (.01 meant one-tenth..?) and then calculations of some kind that filled the margins of the sheets until the paper was a big smudgy mess, which he definitely didn’t. The boxes next to them were slightly more interesting because they had actual words in them, things like  _green magic still having no effect?_ , which made him almost regret his decision to stay hidden instead of telling Alphys exactly what she’d done, even if that might ultimately limit all the new things he could see in this timeline before Chara came back and put everybody out of their misery.

Speaking of which, Undyne still hadn’t moved an inch since he’d arrived.

Flowey set the clipboard back down and tapped against the glass again. When that didn’t elicit a response, he summoned a magic bullet, flinging it at the glass with an echoing  _PINGGG!_ and burst of white light. The fish lurched and made some kind of noise, strings of gray bubbles floating out from between her fangs like ugly pearls. Flowey waited, and then tried again with another bullet. Still no response.

Hm. That probably wasn’t good.

In the name of, uh, making sure that nothing was broken in there, Flowey followed the last two attacks with a glowing halo of magic bullets.  _PING-PING-PING-PING-PINGGGG!_

He zipped down beneath the floor as the fish flung itself against the glass with a BANG that reverberated through the floor. Water sloshed out through the mesh covering the tank and splattered across the tiles. From a safe distance in the corner of the room, Flowey stuck his tongue out.

“Serves you right for ignoring your friends. Hee hee~!”

Gray goop now coated the glass where Undyne had been banging her hands, like spots where a giant snail had been. She glared at Flowey despite his winning smile, then pushed off and returned to her corner to sulk, ignoring any further attempts to elicit a reaction.

Well, that was okay. Flowey would be back later, if he felt like it.

* * *

 He hadn’t always been a creature of habit, much the opposite, but with a finite number of things to do it was inevitable that the days would settle into some sort of rhythm: sleeping in the RUINS, or basking in the sunlight and cool air by Chara’s flowerbed during the daytime. Hanging around the capital to spy on people, which wasn’t as interesting as it used to be, not that anything was.

And there was Alphys, too. Alphys and that new pet of hers. Nothing like that had ever happened when it was just Flowey toying with the Underground. But, then, he wasn't the one in control anymore. And that was okay; he knew who now held the power to SAVE, and he didn't have any reason to mind.

Mostly.

* * *

 A bipedal monster in a grubby blue hoodie was propped up against the door to the RUINS with its hands in its pockets. It hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

Flowey came to a dead stop near the end of the path, hoping for a moment that luck might be on his side and that maybe he could just sneak back the way he came before being noticed. But the path through the woods was smooth, and straight, and he stood out like—well, like a brightly-colored flower against white snow. Flowey shivered.

“sheesh, kid,” Sans said with a wink. “that expression… it’s like you just ran into a horrible undead skeleton or something. weird.”

“What do YOU want?” Flowey demanded, and if his voice shook it was only because it was cold. Sans grinned down at him, which meant nothing because his face was permanently stuck like that, but it was obnoxious anyway. Like the skeleton knew precisely what had happened every other time they’d met at this spot, and was laughing at Flowey on the inside.

Except. Flowey had been there, watching, when Sans met Chara in that hallway in New Home. He’d fought Flowey there a hundred times and always cheated, just like he  _always_  showed up here and fought unfairly and killed Flowey over and over until he wanted to just scream and let himself get killed and then RESET, except that wasn’t what he did that time. He’d chickened out. He didn’t even TRY to touch Chara. ‘ _Have you really done the right thing?’_

Pathetic, TOTALLY pathetic.

“well, for starters, i’m way overdue for a haircut.” When Flowey failed to laugh, Sans shrugged. “…ok, that’s fair. stranger danger and all that stuff. i didn’t come here to hurt you, though. promise. i just wanted to talk.”

Flowey braced himself. This was not the first time Sans had pulled this trick,  _just talking_  until suddenly he wasn’t and most of Flowey’s body was ash and the timeline was basically ruined because no matter what it just led to this. The promise was new, but what was it really worth?

“…About what.”

“hey, now we’re getting someplace.” Sans pressed his foot to the door and pushed off, taking a few crunching steps before sitting cross-legged right there in the snow. Flowey watched his every move, though Sans seemed to ignore his suspicion and continued the chummy act, undeterred. “i'm sans the skeleton. we haven’t met, but unless there are way more talking flowers around here than i suspected… you used to be buddies with my bro.”

“. . .”

Under the permanent layer of snow and ice, Flowey’s vines coiled through the frozen soil. Whatever Sans was playing at, he was taking an awfully big risk by getting this close. He was stronger than he had any right to be, but he was even more fragile than Flowey had been as a monster. Just one attack, any kind of attack, would be enough to do him in. Chara might not like losing one of their toys before getting the chance to play with it, but the thought was awfully tempting…

“that, uh, would be papyrus. for the record,” Sans added.

“I know who—” Flowey started, then shifted tactics. His petals drooped. “I mean, I know who he was. You’re right, we used to be friends.”

Sans nodded in self-satisfaction, as though said brother hadn’t been decapitated not so far away. Maybe he’d even watched it happen, hiding someplace nearby. Well, that was fine. Chara liked hunting down monsters that ran and hid. “i thought so. well, it’s nice to see that you’re still kickin’ around. seemed like you completely vanished after the human did their thing… makes it hard not to assume the worst, y’know?”

Hah, as if Chara would EVER kill their best friend. They’d had a bit of a tense moment in New Home, and then there was that teeny-tiny little misunderstanding over the human SOULs, but they’d spared him. They wouldn’t have done that unless they cared about him, as much as creatures like the two of them could care about anyone.

“I appreciate that you care. But I’m fine, really,” Flowey said.

Sans rested his chin in one bony hand. “haven’t seen any sign of you around snowdin since then, or anyplace else for that matter. what have you been up to? most people would be afraid to get this close to the RUINS.”

_You were gone for a very long time. Did you have fun? I hope that you did not go near those spike puzzles. —No, Mom…_

“I’m… used to being here, I guess. Does it really matter?”

“eh. at least a little bit. after all, my policy has always been that any friend of my bro is a friend of mine. and i'd hate to see anything bad happen to a friend of mine.”

Sans’ eyes clicked shut, which didn’t make any sense because he was a skeleton and they weren’t supposed to have eyes OR eyelids, but monsters didn’t follow that kind of logic. Either way, he looked like one of those creepy wooden dummies. (Oh god. Wait. That tone… Flowey knew what was coming now. But Sans wasn’t stupid enough to harm Chara’s best friend, was he? Did he  _know_?!)

“so i'll be straightforward with you… and hopefully you’ll do the same.”

A pause.

“…but jeez, kid, what kind of person do ya think i am?”

Flowey’s vines remained poised for attack just a few inches below the ground. Above it, he stared blankly, momentarily thrown off despite himself. “Huh?”

One eye winked back open, the socket underneath still glowing dully. “you’re shaking like a leaf. Look, i meant it when i said i didn’t intend to hurt you. but i do have a question, and i’d appreciate an honest answer… …when was the last time you used that special power of yours?”

Flowey put some extra distance between himself and the skeleton. Sans was a liar and obnoxious but never stupid. He had to realize what would happen if he went too far. Chara wouldn’t let him do anything to their friend, and if he did, he’d regret it. “I knew you weren’t REALLY being friendly. I don’t have to tell you ANYTHING.”

“no.. but you already did.” Sans slouched forward until his spine was nearly parallel to the ground, tapping his fingers against his jaw-bone. It didn’t make a cartoon xylophone noise, sadly, more like the  _tck-tck-tck_  of somebody clicking two teacups together. “and that expression… going out on a limb here, but i'd say that it’s been awhile. before that friend of yours left, maybe.”

“I don’t HAVE to tell you ANYTHING.”

“or maybe… even before then? seems strange that you’d go through all the trouble of helping them, just to sit around down here once they left. you’d think you would’ve stuck together, one way or another. if you really were friends, that is.”

“. . .”

“but, then, you were never such a good friend to anybody. maybe that’s why this whole scenario turned out so crummy for you. might wanna work on that next time around, yeah?”

“Shut  _up!_ ”

Sans laughed—an ugly, near-monotone  _heh heh heh._  With a yawn, he straightened his back and pushed himself to his feet, leaving one hand dangling at his side instead of in its pocket. He stared right through Flowey. Flowey stared at the hand.

“alright, then. that’s all the answer i needed, so i'll leave you alone. since you technically haven’t hurt anybody, i guess i don’t have to do anything about you for now.

so, if i were you… i'd be real careful. never know who’s watching.”

His eye-sockets darkened, two black pits against white bone, and he waved with a single slow, lazy motion. Flowey flinched down against the snow as if that would somehow help him, vines bursting up from the ground and lasting toward the general vicinity of where the skeleton stood. When they swept through nothing except air, and Flowey’s body remained intact, he finally dared to peek up again and found that he was alone. The door to the RUINS loomed, and the forest was silent, with only the footprints in the snow suggesting that anyone had been there for a very long time.

Flowey let out a long-suppressed  _ARRGHHH_  and smacked his face against the snow a few times, then regained his senses and retreated underground. He made a bee-line for the RUINS, burrowing until the permafrost gave way to stone and dry sand, and the brittle roots of the dead tree in front of his old Home, the place where they’d lived before Chara came and everything changed.

He dug down beneath the old tree’s roots, where nobody could find him or hurt him or do anything bad at all, and fumed.

Just a little longer, and then they’d come back. Even if it took a long time, he’d waited before and he’d keep waiting. They would come. They’d come back when he called them, and they’d come back again.

They would.

They  _would._

* * *

* * *

Sans kept hidden under the trees long after the flower vanished, his breath huffing out in little clouds of condensation. The bark under his hand was papery-thin, peeling outward, probably birches of some kind but he wasn’t a tree expert. Could hardly even feel the things without skin.

As an afterthought, he exerted a little burst of magic to make his eyes brighten, winking back on as if somebody had flipped a switch.

_yeah, sans, you’re a real badass. sure scared the hell outta that little kid._

He snorted. The imaginary gears in his skull click-click-clicked away.

So.

The flower had done something bad enough to piss off another Sans, to the point that even his presence scared it. That was worth confirming, though not immediately relevant by itself.

Once the human arrived, the flower acted as their lackey. The reset-switches for bro’s puzzles were all strangled into submission by vines, and he’d heard that the Core modules were all busted up, making it impossible to swap ‘em around and impede the human’s progress that way. Timeline-jumps came at regular intervals corresponding to points at which even an adult human should have died, but didn’t—encounters with stronger monsters, primarily. Draw your own conclusions, there.

And then the human murdered Asgore, and—after that point, they did  _something_ , and then time died.

Except that it didn’t.

And now, months later, he was picking up new anomalous activity that was not the work of the flower—he’d bet cash on it—and did not follow the general pattern that had arisen while the human stalked the Underground. If the flower and/or human’s previous shenanigans were like rips in the fabric of timespace, then these distortions were like somebody grabbing big handfuls at random, squishing and crumpling it but leaving the material technically intact. If he hadn’t been specifically looking for them, he never could have spotted the wrinkles.

So to speak.

Sans arched his back and rolled his shoulders in place, stretching his spine as far as it could go without his hands actually leaving his pockets. He slumped again. Then stepped out from between the trees and took a shortcut to Grillby’s, soggy clumps of snow still smushed into the bottom of his slippers.

With two booths occupied and a single bird monster perched at the counter, you might easily assume that it was just a slow business day in a sleepy little town, if you’d never been to Snowdin before. Not just before, but  _before_. The tables where the canine unit always hung out after their shifts were spotless in a way that would never look right to Sans again, though leaving a bunch of empty doggy dishes at their old spots would’ve been a little too far into needless pathos, so he wasn’t going to criticize.

The rabbit monster in the center booth perked their ears as Sans passed by, their chin pressed firmly against the tabletop as if glued there by some old spill. He would’ve wondered what was in the mug sitting in front of their face, but Grillby was pretty strictly against serving alcohol in any form for precisely the reasons you’d expect from a guy literally made out of fire.

(Because fire monsters were classy people and this was a family-friendly establishment. Duh.)

“Hiya, Sansyyy!"

“a couple of ‘burgs to go. fries too,” Sans said. As Grillby headed back to the kitchen, the rabbit monster twisted around and flopped over the back of their booth like one of those stuffed toys with the plastic pellets inside. He waggled his fingers at them.

With his other hand, he fidgeted with a crumpled receipt from a previous snack-run, buried deep in his pocket.

The problem, or at least the main problem, was that he had no way of knowing what the human was doing and therefore no way to know if it had anything to do with the seemingly-random uptick in anomalous activity over the past month. Or why all readings pointed to the abrupt and absolute end to the timeline when nothing of the sort actually happened. Sure, not getting completely wiped from existence was great and Sans was a big fan of not being dead, but at least you could be pretty confident about the end of the world being a bad thing and then go from there. Whereas he now had no clear way of continuing to do his one remaining job, unless the human came back to kill everyone else, the human erased all their memories of everything after last summer and killed them on some metaphysical level, or some other human took a nosedive into the Underground and handed over their SOUL on a platter. Not really appealing options, any of them.

“Come sit with me!” the rabbit monster said, shimmying to one side to make extra room in the empty booth. Sans shrugged in apology.

“sorry, bud,” he said. “i gotta get home to walk my pet rock before it leaves gravel all over the carpet.”

It was still possible that Mettaton had been right and the human never meant to hurt the rest of their kind. The irregular readings could be a fluke, the product of a barely-functioning machine manned by a moderately-qualified skeleton. Wildly overoptimistic, sure, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility completely. Not with the photo to consider.

If the human had that much of a heart, though, you’d think they would act upon that and clean up their mess. You’d think.

(And maybe he’d been too quick to rule out the flower? It had been hanging around the lab in Hotland when Sans spotted it again, and it’d be just like Alphys to seek out her old creation for company. But what could she be doing, even with the thing’s help, and what might it gain from that..?)

The rabbit monster pouted and unhooked their arms from around the seat, sliding out of sight and thumping against the table.

Luckily for Sans, if not his fuzzy friend, Grillby chose that moment to return with the food. And Sans, in the interest of sparing the Grillster from complete and total shock of earth-shaking proportions, vamoosed without any Gold changing hands.

Sans’ tab grew bigger. Time limped forward.

There was work to do.


	3. Just Daydreaming Here, But...

ENTRY NUMBER 24:

* A strong SOUL isn't even necessary as long as a determined being has enough stable matter to work with.  
* But I've already used up all of her dust...

* * *

The flower.

Its happy yellow petals evoked something long-buried in the back of       's head, which now felt like it had been broken open and something poured inside that burned its one good eye and made its ears ring. There existed some connection between this ringing and that sunshine-bright color, but the sound and image slid apart as soon as the flower vanished.

Possibly this had to do with the dust oozing from       's skin. Left alone, it found some amusement in watching the streaks of gray following its waving hand like double-vision. When its arm tired and the novelty wore off, it stopped. The dust cleared. The water was clean and cool.

If there had been anything within reach, anything at all,        would have tried to break it. But there wasn't, and the urge faded into a dull tiredness.

        swam to the opposite side of the tank, then back.

Once.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Moving around did not make       's head hurt any more than it did already, and staying still did not make it hurt any less.        stopped swimming, and the momentum carried it forward until it bumped against the tank and stayed there.

It covered its eye and tried to sleep.

 

It stopped trying.

The ringing sound in its ears would not stop.        pushed at the side of its tank. Which did not break.

It brought both hands up and slammed them into the glass.

The glass looked dirtier.

        pulled from a reserve of power which had gone unused for the short time that it could remember. There was a flash of blue light and then        was clutching its head again, vision darkening around the edges, its screech silenced by the water.

 

_Where..?_

 

Its mouth felt gritty.

Above the wavering surface was only the black grating and empty air.        pressed its slimy hands against this barrier, but despite its thinness compared to the glass, it did not budge.        braced itself against the tank and gripped onto the grating, pulling with all of its strength. Breaking free should have been easy, and so it ignored the hard edges biting into the palms of what had been its hands until its arms were suddenly back into the water, leaving melting clumps clinging to the edges of the dark metal.

It tried again, or tried to try again, but its hands wouldn't bend anymore and dust was no longer oozing out of them but pouring like billowing smoke. The sight left        uneasy for some reason.

 

The yellow monster returned. She wrung her hands and moved her mouth to form silent words. Anxious twisting fingers and thick oval glasses. These details were familiar, though        could not have said where or when it had seen this monster before. It couldn't say much of anything, and had only the vaguest notion that there existed any place except this room.

It withdrew to the corner of the tank, closer to the wall, putting enough distance between itself and the yellow monster to render her face indecipherable and her surroundings an unfocused wash of green and black. She reached for something in her pocket and circled around the other side, and        looked away. The dark box poised at the tank's top edge went quiet, as did the sound of bubbling water.

She moved across the room and produced a rectangular silver object, opening it and removing something from inside. Next came a white armload of something that draped over her arms, which she set down next to whatever had been in the box. It couldn't quite see.

When the monster turned around, however, the glowing tube in its hands was impossible to miss, red light spilling out between her fingers. It burned through the mental fog that defined       's existence, filling it with a confusing and nameless dread.

Or it would have, at least, except that        could barely keep its eye open or think of any reason to try. Without enough room to do anything especially tiring, sleep was just a way to make time pass, yet suddenly it was impossible to resist.

Before        could connect this feeling to whatever the yellow monster was doing, it had already lost consciousness.

* * *

* * *

"Oh my god, wh-what did you _do?_ " Alphys whispered in dismay.

Dust trickled down from the ragged edges of where Undyne's fingers should have been. The damage looked worse than it really was, but that did not make it any better; losing stability over time was one thing, but still looked like she'd been hurt somehow. And Alphys thought she'd made sure that there was nothing inside the tank that might cause harm to her friend.

At the moment, they were both situated atop the tank's cover; Undyne lying on a layer of damp towels, Alphys kneeling next to her, directly on the metal. It was precarious and not especially comfortable, but moving Undyne any farther than that would have been neither safe nor feasible given her frail condition. At least this way, if the lack of water pressure caused her to suddenly lose what stability she still had, fixing the problem would take only moments. And if Alphys herself fell in, well, she could swim.

Despite her worry, Alphys' hands moved with perfect efficiency, as if disconnected from the rest of her. She slid the needle up through the cap in the vial, pressed the plunger to remove all the air from the tube, tipped the vial up, and pulled. She didn't fill the syringe completely, but just enough to leave a small red ring of liquid around the base of the needle.

She'd been so careless, the last time. She could have used less Determination on those monsters, and then maybe they could have turned out normal. They could've been like Undyne, how she used to be before the human ruined everything. And if that didn't happen, and they still ended up all melted and strange-looking, she still wouldn't have to worry about running out now.

And since she was just daydreaming anyway, maybe she would also be able to fix all the other monsters who'd Fallen Down, or Undyne would, because Alphys was dumb and made bad decision after bad decision, but  _this_ had never been what she'd wanted. She'd meant well. And that was supposed to make a difference, wasn't it?

"O-okay, I'm j-just going to, to do this really quick, and then it's done a-a-and I'll leave you alone and... ohgodthatsoundsreallycreepy s-sorry, sorry..." Alphys mumbled, mostly to herself, as she re-capped the vial. She set it aside and lifted Undyne's arm by the elbow, positioning the needle as quickly as she could without risk of screwing it up. Undyne seemed to want nothing to do with her now, whenever she had any chance at all to express that, and this whole process made Alphys kind of want to barf even though she'd already seen what would happen if she didn't. On the bridge. And then again here in the lab, just when she thought she'd gotten everything right and Undyne was going to wake up and everything would be okay and she'd just sort of fix everything somehow.

What a good friend, Alphys was.

She emptied the syringe, set it aside and, slowly, set Undyne's arm back down on the dusty towel. She didn't look at her face.

Within a few minutes, her friend's hands would begin to heal from whatever had happened to them. By morning, she would wake up sore but healthier than she was right now. It would be just a few days before Alphys would need to repeat this process, but that was to be expected now.

"...Sorry."

Moving gingerly, she lowered Undyne into the water before gathering up the supplies and closing the tank. Getting down was a little awkward with her arms full, but by now even she could manage it without either dropping anything or falling on her face.

She hopped off the second-to-last rung of the ladder and set about putting everything away; the tube of anesthetic back in its case, the used needle in the trash. She scratched absently at the imprint the tank's mesh had left against her leg, then stopped and looked slowly back to where she'd been kneeling a minute earlier. Then down to Undyne's damaged hands.

Oh.

She looked away, grabbed the rest of her supplies, and scampered out into the hall.

Back into storage went the Determination, and the towel went into the wash. Easy. She was sweating and she reached compulsively for her cell phone, but the display remained blank white when she tried to open the web browser. Of course. And even if she could send text messages from down here, the only person she might want to talk to would definitely be asleep by now.

Alphys put her phone away and shivered, chewing on her claws as she glanced to each side of the hallway, both of which ended in murky dark.

Given her usual mannerisms, one might have expected these surroundings to scare Alphys, and for a while, they did. After a certain point, though, nightmarish creatures jumping out from the shadows just became a nuisance instead of frightening. The dog one, for example,  _always_ wanted her to drop whatever she was doing and play with it. The little monsters that looked like brains were much the same, in their own way. The rest were different. Not necessarily bad or violent, though sometimes emotions could get the better of them. Just different.

After the evacuation, they'd all gone elsewhere—one still had some family members, and a couple others still had friends, and the rest were staying with other monsters. The human had been... thorough. Which, strangely, turned out to be beneficial for the Amalgamates. Sort of. If the evacuation had not happened, and forced Alphys to reveal her secrets, she never would have had the courage to let the rest of the Underground find out about what she'd done.

She still wished the human had never come. Or if they had, then that Undyne could have killed them. Or that, better yet, they would have just fallen a little differently, in some distant recess of the RUINS where nobody would ever find them. Or if just  _one_ of the traps from the old days had worked, the kind built long before Asgore's mandates on safety, the ones with spikes that were actually meant to kill intruders...

It was a nice mental image. Something nice to think about. Just a what-if.

Before everything began to go wrong, she'd hoped that her experiments might make war on the surface unnecessary. The first six SOULs were gathered long before she was born, so long ago that Asgore could make up any sort of story to explain what had happened to their owners, and no human alive today could prove him wrong. No need for fighting, and nobody would have to die.

Alphys knew better now.

On an impulse more than anything, before returning to the room where her friend still slept, Alphys visited the nearest storage room to dig up an old sketchbook she'd used to plan out early designs for Mettaton's body. It wasn't like she'd sleep much herself, anyway.

* * *

* * *

The machine's mosquito whine faded almost to silence as Sans tapered off his magic, the sound perceptible only after he practically crawled inside the mess of tubes and wires composing the thing's metallic guts. He left it running for another two minutes before pulling the plug. Or, more accurately, before flailing his arm around in the general direction of the plug until it didn't feel like he had an electric toothbrush jammed inside his skull anymore.

Arm tingling up to the radius from magic overuse, Sans squirmed back out and tapped through the front panel controls with his other hand. He hit [OUTPUT] and checked the wall clock. Which... still said it was early-afternoon, just as it had since running out of batteries at some point.

He flexed his numb fingers with a series of clicks and clatters as he went back to retrieve the takeout bag from what might have technically been yesterday. His violation of protocol would've gotten him seriously chewed out back in the day, because it was just plain bad practice and it was just plain bad food, and if he didn't maintain good habits then his hp would tank and all his marrow would fall out like toothpaste from a tube and he'd burst into flames and die. Oh yeah, and his arteries would get real messed up, no doubt about that one.

(The more important aspect was that eating in the workshop meant fewer people would get to see how that even worked with the whole perma-grin thing going on, and in the end, wasn't that all that mattered?)

A long sheet of perforated paper spilled to the floor from a slot at the machine's side, its inner workings whirring and clicking for a minute before settling back down. Sans poured the past few fries into his mouth and tossed the carton back into the bag. With the feeling in his arm mostly returned, he tore off the sheet and brought it back to his worktable, sweeping aside loose papers and wrappers to make space.

Nothing  _really_ exciting had gone down tonight, since if it had then he wouldn't be here right now. That whole line of thought was a downer, but one he was used to, and he'd stayed up this long so he figured he'd stick it out just a little bit longer. Score one for the sunk cost fallacy.

The printout was filled with rows and columns of what was primarily garbage data. The machine had never originally been intended for a task like this, in the same way that blue magic wasn't really  _for_  what Sans did with it, but the basic principle was simple: send out enough random noise, and eventually it will resonate with whatever energy signatures were already present, strengthening them to the point of readability while producing a relatively low level of easily-ignored static. At that point, tracking those points of resonance back to their source and sketching out a general map of what was going on became relatively feasible. It was a crude method, though, one that made it dangerously easy to overlook signs of minor anomalies. Stronger bursts of activity were clearer, but after a certain point it was simpler to try and catch signs of changes firsthand instead.

Which, in other words, meant that this strategy was best-suited for the one thing that needed more specialized equipment to be properly detected. Equipment which he would never be able to get his hands on again. Great.

On the plus side, while this most recent burst of activity was significantly stronger than those of the past few weeks, neither the pattern nor the energy output aligned with what the human's abuse of their power had looked like, so it seemed a safe guess that no observable changes in reality could have taken place. Since he was still no closer to figuring out who or what was behind it than when he'd entered here, that was nice to know.

Sans reached over for a battered notebook and flipped back to some of his earlier notes. The penciled-in formulas were so smudged that he almost didn't need to have bothered with encoding anything. He scribbled down the new info, marking off the stuff that might be worth rechecking later, then filed the printout away for later reference and returned the notebook to its drawer.

As he did so, he couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was  _missing_  something, some sign or hint that he was supposed to get but didn't. Normally he liked to think he was pretty good at making educated guesses, but none of the facts added up in a way that felt satisfying. It was enough to make him wonder if the Sans in the photo was trying to troll him across time and space; personally he didn't have much energy to devote to pranks these days, but he wouldn't put it past himself either.

Sans yawned, gathered up the dropcloth from the floor, then tossed it back over the machine and turned out the lights.

* * *

Alphys' voice carried from the foyer to the kitchen, interspersed with vaguely mystical-sounding chattering and giggles. To her credit, she wasn't letting it get to her. Much.

"You're welc—I mean, thanks?? Um, I mean, I know that... that it's slightly short notice, but with help from you guys, it won't be a problem at all. Right?"

Sans picked up a half-empty soda in a fancy glass bottle, the kind that came with a marble in the cap. He rattled it around before setting it back down next to a truly ancient container of snails. Then, on a whim, he took out the rest of the sodas and shook them all too, one by one, before putting them back and shutting the fridge.

By the time he'd finished, the guests had apparently just left, because their voices had been replaced by a muffled  _gaaaAAAAHHH_ from the other room. Sans left the kitchen and followed Alphys from the foyer, finding her at the table whisper-screaming into her hands.

He waited for her to come back up for air. "hope i'm not interrupting you here."

Alphys yanked her arm away from her mouth, red-faced, and clutched her hands together. Her eyes looked a little red too, as if she hadn't slept much more than he did. "Oh! Ahh, h-hey. I didn't realize that you were back yet."

"yeah, it's a surprise to me too." If Sans craned his neck, he could see four sets of teacups centered around a opened notebook. Not the kind he'd been using a few hours earlier, but one with thick drawing paper. "what was that about? you working on something?"

She nodded. "Consultants. I was thinking... I've put off setting up any reliable defenses in the RUINS for way too long. So I've been, um, planning on fixing that. Soon."

"huh. so, that's what you've been up to these days," Sans said. Even if he hadn't been an especially observant monsters, it was hard not to ignore the twitchy way Alphys always mentioned the need to just  _go somewhere and do something_ , leaving him to make excuses to whoever might be looking for her. Or she'd just leave with no explanation at all. Until now he'd been content to let her go do her thing since it freed him from having to avoid explaining what  _he_ was doing, but he was beginning to see the flaws in that plan.

"Oh! Uhh— well, y- er, no, I've been... um, I mean, I've been working on s-something but it's not really, um, ANYWAY—" Alphys scooted past Sans and pulled the sketchbook off the table, too quickly for him to get much more than a glimpse of what looked like a cavern interior as he leaned out of her way. "Anyway, s-since I kind of suck at magic and most of the mechanical puzzles ended up not, not really being any good, I thought I could get some Madjicks to, y-you know, help out, w-w-with enchanted ones instead?"

Sans shifted the Alphys-and-the-flower-are-up-to-something hypothesis from  _maybe_ to  _actually for real look into this_. Seemed strange that she'd be getting other monsters involved, though, or expressing interest in actually hurting humans. Could mean nothing, and in that case, he had no need to do anything.

"...huh. why the urgency now? the door's still locked," Sans said. Even if there was nothing sketchy going on, this wasn't really a road he wanted to go down.

"They've been re-locked, but still... that wasn't enough to stop th-the human that killed everyone. And if they come back, or another human comes, we're even less prepared than we were before. I know that going there is a little bit risky, but I'm not planning to be alone or anything."

"uh-huh."

"O-obviously we could just, you know, look for wherever they're getting in. And then put a spike pit in front of it, or under it. But that would destroy the SOUL as well. So, it should be able to incapacitate, l-long enough to safely retrieve the SOUL. I was thinking of something like electricity tiles..."

"...uh-huh."

The old lady behind the door, who had apparently been much more than some mysterious hermit-lady, never did specify whether she meant that she wanted him to protect  _the next_ human that left the RUINS, or  _any_ human that did so. On the other hand, by that same wording, he owed nothing to any human that fell into the Underground until the moment they passed through the door. On the, uh, freaky-mutated-third-hand...

Finally Alphys looked up from her sketch, shifting in discomfort. "I'm rambling again, aren't I?"

"nah, s'all good. not like i'm in any place to argue, if you think this is important. though, uh, alphys?"

"Yeah?"

"... ...forget it. hey, you want a soda?"

* * *

* * *

_"I found something!"_

_Undyne scraped off layers of semi-dried mud from the front of the computer tower, revealing a funny-looking logo she didn't recognize at all. She looked around for the monitor that should've gone with it while waiting for Alphys to wade over, but there didn't seem to be any sign. That was too bad, though not surprising either; nearly everything down here was either busted or incomplete or both, which was why it had all been junked._

_"H-hey, that's perfect! Let me just..." Alphys said as she appeared at Undyne's side, sliding one strap of her bubblegum-pink tote bag off her shoulder and rummaging through its contents. Undyne grinned and waved her away._

_"Nah, I got it."_

_"Are you sure? W-wait, l-let me—"_

_Before Alphys could finish, Undyne picked up the computer and punched it with her free hand at many one-third strength,_ _which resulted in a really satisfying crunching noise instead of total destruction.  "See?"_

_Alphys let out the most adorable squeak and nearly dropped the screwdriver set she'd just retrieved. "Hey, b-be careful! Y-you could get tetanus from that!"_

_"Oh, uh, oops. Sorry," Undyne said._

_Alphys shrugged and motioned for Undyne to set the thing down, then knelt next to it, resting her tote bag on her lap to keep it out of the water._ _"It's okay! W-well, I mean, unless you really get tetanus or something. ...Anyway, just let me take a look." She peeked into the fist-sized hole in the computer's casing, then rummaged in her bag for some pliers to extract the, uh, whatever the inside-bits of a computer were called. Undyne wiped her hands across the front of her jeans._

 _"Y'know, if weird diseases are that much of an issue, maybe you shouldn't keep coming here without shoes on." She poked one of Alphys' bare feet with the toe of her rainboot, earning another surprised squeak in response. Which was cute as hell and_ _COMPLETELY not intentional. "Just saying?"_

_Alphys gave her one of those smirky, squinty little Looks, then quickly turned back to her work. She wiggled something around for a bit and unplugged something else with a loud click. Within a few moments, she'd extracted a handful of wires, a little fan, and what looked like a big green sheet of hard plastic covered in shiny metal bits. The angular yellow lines running across its surface reminded Undyne of the floor tiles in the Core's entrance._

_"So, that part's the 'motherboard', right?" she asked. Computers had never really been her thing, and she hardly touched her Undernet account, since if she wanted to talk to her friends then she could just... go do that. But OBVIOUSLY Alphys was into technology of all kinds because she was the royal scientist and being a huge nerd was practically in the job description, so Undyne was happy to go along with it whenever they hung out._

_"Yep! It doesn't look like it's in very bad condition, so it might still work once I clean it off. Otherwise, I'll just use it for something else. The capacitors should still be good, for example."_

_"The whatnow?"_

_"Oh, they're like, um, kind of like batteries? But they store electricity instead of using a chemical reaction. They keep the computer from getting fried... I like keeping a supply of stuff like that for Mettaton, just in case he breaks something._ _He's really picky, though. Especially when it comes to parts we found here. So, ahhh, don't tell him? H-heh."_

_One the computer was completely emptied-out, they walked past the mounds of old toys and broken furniture and a zillion other things that had accumulated in odd corners of the dump, where the water from the falls couldn't drag them all the way into the abyss. The rushing water was deeper here, and the current sucked at her boots with every step as if trying (really wimpily) to pull her along with it. Alphys, being much shorter, was almost waist-deep._

_Funny enough, it was right around this spot that they'd first met. Actually, they'd run into each other here quite a few times, but the first overshadowed the rest. And not for an entirely happy reason..._

_"Ahh, that reminds me of something I've, um, been meaning to ask. A-about something from, uh, a little while ago."_

_Dammit. "Yeah?"_

_"Do you remember when you brought your cell phone to my lab, that one time? And wanted me to fix it?"_

_Undyne broke into a big grin, partially out of relief that oh yeah, right, Alphys wasn't a human from one of those history shows of hers, with the ability to psychically pick up on someone's needlessly-depressing thoughts. "Oh, yeah!! You did it in like three seconds, it was so cool!"_

_"It took a, a LITTLE longer than that, but, um." Alphys readjusted the bag's shoulder straps, her cheeks reddening for some reason. "Well, anyway! I was just wondering, how did it get broken in the first place?"_

_"Why do you wanna know?"_

_"I just wondered. I was sorting through everything and found the, shrapnel again."_

_"Huh. Uh, well." Undyne scratched the back of her neck. "It just, uh, got busted. I think it fell out of my pocket and, like, I stepped on it by accident or something. I dunno." It really was an accident, sort of. Undyne's only goal had been breaking the thing enough to justify a visit to the local cute nerdy girl, but she'd been so excited about this flash of brilliance that she went just a teeny tiny bit too far. "It wasn't a problem for you, was it?"_

_"N-nonono, not at all! I was just wondering, forget I said anything..!" Alphys babbled, until Undyne snorted and waved it away._

_"C'mon, you don't have to get all apologetic. I mean, you CAN 'case it's really cute, but you don't need to!"_

_Alphys mumbled something and scampered off to an especially large pile of junk. God, she was adorable. It made Undyne want to... want to just punch something super hard to reassert her toughness! Then she had a slightly more productive idea._

_"Hey, while we're here, I'm gonna go ahead and grab some more of those golden flowers, okay?"_

_"N-no problem!" Alphys called back._

_Undyne jogged past the edge of the dump and down the tunnel, to the patch of flowers growing beside the cavern wall. Nobody knew how they'd reached this secluded corner of the Underground, or how they'd survived being half-drowned and totally deprived of sunlight, but Undyne thought it was pretty impressive. Convenient, too, since the alternative was traveling to New Home every time she wanted to prepare a new batch of golden flower tea._

_She slowed to a stop, the weak current still sloshing against her boots._

_A human child cowered in the center of the flowerbed, their clothing muddied and torn, striped sweater glued to their skin in dark patches where blood had soaked through. The flowers rustled as the human rocked forward and back, hugging their knees to their chest. They were smaller and younger than they should have been. They'd outgrown that sweater ages ago..._

_...Wait, what?_

_The human was on their feet, swaying as if they might collapse in a heap from their injuries. But they displayed no tiredness or pain in their expression, or fear. Their mouth was a straight line and their half-closed eyes vacant. Dead. And now she saw that they were holding a plastic knife, a little toy that would have been a completely laughable choice of weapon if not for the dust coating its surface. She hadn't seen that until now._

_Her guards. It must have killed them. Undyne adjusted her footing and summoned an energy spear into her hands. Or rather, she tried to do those things, but her feet would not move, as if the water had become cement or her own green magic had turned against her. She tried to shout a warning to Alphys but no sound came out and her magic wouldn't work. She couldn't do anything only watch as the human staggered as if pulled towards her on a string, moving like something dead she'd died she was going to die her friend would die and there was nothing she could do she couldn't move they were dead empty nothing behind their eyes nothing dust everywhere covering them floating on the water even before they raised the knife and lunged ALPHYS—_

 

 

        shuddered.

Fragmented memories flickered back into existence, however faintly, fueled by the burning sensation swirling beneath its skin.

Rushing water. A yellow flower. A yellow monster. All the same elements which made up its own existence, everything it had ever seen or experienced. Except that there had been something else, something  _wrong_ , and once called back up, its image did not leave even as the brief moment of restlessness passed and        slipped back down into sleep.


	4. Nothing Down Here Ever Changes

ENTRY NUMBER 5:

* Gave my monthly address today.  
* I don't stutter so much anymore, so I guess that's an improvement?  
* It still feels like people are only humoring me out of pity, though.  
* Ugggghhhh.

* * *

In an aging stone house on the outskirts of the capital, in the dim bedroom where their unconscious sibling had remained since the day before, a Whimsalot named Cabbage hovered—literally—at their bedside. 

Across the floor, scientific magazines and bulky medical textbooks rested precariously atop stacks of encyclopedia volumes like geologic layers in the world's smallest mountain range. The mess made Cabbage itch despite their more pressing concerns, but they still focused all of their energy into the cloud of light that emanated from their hands and bathed the white bedsheets in a garish, green glow. The pillow tucked beneath Lace's shoulders sparkled faintly where the translucent scales from their wings were beginning to fall away. Otherwise there was no hint of motion anywhere near them, save for their quiet breathing and the constant buzz of Cabbage's wings.

Their ability had developed to the point that they could have maintained the green magic for several minutes longer, despite their distraction and lack of sleep, but they allowed it to fade and did not start again. Secretly they knew that this sort of healing would do no good, but they needed to do _something_ and had nothing else to try. After their unsuccessful audience with the queen, they'd flown straight to the nearest library and filled their inventory to the brim with medical books, ignoring the expression on the librarian's face as the general theme of their selections became obvious, and the uneasy glances from the Loox after returning home. They hadn't expected to entirely understand the books, but it seemed like years of struggling through old human stories about knights and princes should have prepared them for the challenge.

As it turned out, knowing when to say "you" as opposed to "thee" wasn't really comparable to understanding the inner workings of the SOUL, or how to revitalize one that had begun to fade. The queen herself said it was hopeless, and she of all monsters would surely know that... even if she'd been equally pessimistic about their elder sibling's condition, before miraculously restoring  _them_ to life.

Maybe if Cabbage had stayed determined instead of panicking and fleeing, pretending they'd had even the slightest idea of what to do, maybe she would have changed her mind. She would have had to eventually, if they harassed her long enough, even if doing so was probably against some sort of law. Monster society (or Asgore, at least, given how long he'd ruled) had always been much more lenient about how you could or couldn't act around royalty, compared to how humans interacted with _their_ rulers, but there had to be a limit.

The door creaked, bringing Cabbage back to the present, then came to an abrupt stop as it struck a particularly tall pile of books. The stack teetered and fell, spilling across the floor, and the intruder forced the door farther open. Two Froggits peered inside.

"Ribbit ribbit."

"(We can sense your magic from the other room. How long have you been doing this?)"

Cabbage picked at a loose thread dangling from the hem of their skirt. The gauzy fabric's edge disintegrated into ragged fuzzy as the thread skipped back and forth.

"Ribbit ribbit?"

"(...How long have they been here?)"

Cabbage reached toward the door and a half-dozen phantom butterflies dashed themselves against it in a shower of white sparkles. The door crashed back into its frame with a perversely satisfying bang, and in its wake, Cabbage heard four webbed feet slapping against the floor outside as their owners bounded frantically away.

Despite the noise, Lace remained still and lifeless. They didn't even seem to be asleep, because they were always so timid that even the sound of the Froggits passing by the room should have sent them hiding beneath the bed. It was always a little strange given that they'd both spent their lives in the most densely-populated region of the Underground; Cabbage had been very shy in the past as well, before they'd acquired their secondhand helmet and a paper-thin veneer of stoicism to match, but even so...

Cabbage flutter-jumped down to a pile of books at the center of the room, landed badly, and clambered up to a volume balanced at the top of a different stack. By the time they reached it, they'd already half-forgotten why they wanted that book in particular. Of the ones that even discussed the condition afflicting Lace, they were in agreement about  _how_ a Fallen monster's SOUL deteriorated but contradictory about the precise reasons why. Was it physical strength, or a lack thereof? A matter of personality? Heredity?

How was it that, out of three related and practically identical-looking monsters, this could happen to only two of them?

They reached what looked like a cross-section of a mammalian monster's bone structure, flipped back to the title page, then allowed the book to fall shut, wings drooped in defeat. Maybe they really were wasting their time. If some other monster had discovered a way to revive Fallen monsters long enough ago that they'd published a book about it, then Queen Alphys' work would have been of no importance. Maybe her experiments could be recreated, but the only person who knew how to try was the queen herself.

In the hallway outside of the room, the sound of hopping Froggit feet grew louder. Cabbage quietly prayed for them to keep going, but the door creaked open  _again_ and  _again_ it rammed against the books behind it. Wings buzzing furiously, they sprang back up and flung a magic arrow in the general direction of the intruders, a sparkling trail of magic chasing it across the room. "Don't ANY of you listen?!"

_b u t   i t   d i d n ' t   w o r k ._

There was a sound like a glass cup shattering, startling Cabbage into falling. They bounced against the book they'd just been checking and slid down with an  _oof_. They recovered within a few moments and peered over the little wall they'd built over the course of the past night. Broken shards of their weapon glittered where they'd embedded themselves in the walls, leaving behind little pockmarks in the faded paint. A pale liquid rolled through the seams in the floorboards beneath the gap in the door.

Cabbage clambered up and, given that they were still wearing their helmet, tried not to cough. "Hck—hello, Reaper Bird. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was—"

* * *

* * *

Despite the utter sameness of everything,       's surroundings were clearer than they had been before. Its eye might have healed, in the same way that its whole body felt a little stronger than it had been before        slept, or it may have just seemed that way because it was easier to concentrate, easier to find the words for things, if only within its own head. Despite this improvement, trying to think still felt like trying to swim through syrup; possible, with effort. But slow.

At least time was the one thing        had in abundance.

So it used it.

The outline of the tank's grating divided the light from overhead into rows of diamond-shaped slices with wavering edges. The aquarium filter produced a constant hum that        only really noticed when it thought to do so. Balanced at the top edge of the tank, it reached far enough down for its opening to be partially submerged, so that the metal grating had to be fitted around it. This left a gap roughly as wide as the yellow monster's hands.        stared up through it, past it.

 _She_ had a way to get into the tank when she wanted, usually to leave food or do... something, but tearing through the cover from the inside hadn't worked before. The filter, though,  _that_ wasn't bolted directly to the glass like the outer rim of the grating.

       considered this, and floated, and considered longer. Moving slowly, with care, it swam back until there was a full body-length between itself and its obstacle. Almost before it had even decided what it wanted to do, its head pounded and the world darkened around the edges, but the burning feeling radiating all through       's body dulled any sense of pain that might have followed, and urged it to continue.

There was a harsh buzz and an incandescent flash of blue light as an unformed blob of magic built up in the empty space between water and metal, then crashed against the filter in a wave. Shards of black plastic exploded outward, littering the floor and dropping into the water with a series of splashes. Then the magic died and        sank, drained, its vision blurred.

And still, the burning feeling demanded movement, action, _some_ _thing_ beyond floating and waiting for nothing.

        shook itself and swam back up, circling the opening in the tank's cover that now stood clear. It braced itself, then burst out of the water and made a grab for the top edge of the glass. Latching on with both hands, it dragged itself up and remained balanced there, blinking as its surroundings came into focus. The room wasn't much bigger than the tank's interior, though it didn't seem that way from the inside. Cluttered around the sink were stacks of buckets, coiled length of hose, tools of various kinds. The air was cold.

Just as        took all of this in, a now-familiar sense of weight settled into its body; without the gentle support of the water or the ability to float, every move took more effort and        felt as if it might simply collapse and fall apart entirely. It didn't stop to think about this, it didn't care. It squirmed around to fix its grip on the glass, then rolled clumsily over the edge and fell

_not half as far as it seemed from above. Not a safe distance, but not the instant death she'd expected when she'd tackled the human-or-demon-or-whatever-they-were. If she'd known, she might've made an effort to land well, or might've just shoved the thing off the bridge and called it a day. Really, there were all kinds of safer strategies she could have used, but none had the heroic drama of going down with her opponent. Wouldn't have bought her more than an extra thirty seconds or so, either. She'd thought. Whoops?_

_Judging by the knife hilt protruding from between the plates of armor over her abdomen, life was still gonna suck once the adrenaline wore off, but she wasn't super worried. The demon was dead and the civilizations on both sides of the barrier were safe, and that was_ _all that mattered in the end. Plus, Alphys had promised to watch the fight from her cameras; she'd send help, fix whatever was busted, and then later, she'd freak out at Undyne for pulling such a needlessly dangerous stunt. Undyne just needed to hang on and hope her friend was prepared for whatever she'd find. It was getting harder to keep her eye open, and despite her overall optimism, she knew that things probably wouldn't be pretty._

 _She clenched her teeth and pulled herself onto her side, trying not to jostle the knife around too much, then nearly gagged once she saw what had been lying near her all along. Her armor had absorbed part of_ _the impact when she hit the cavern floor, but the human wore only shorts, hiking boots, and a thin sweater. It must've died instantly. The alternative wasn't something she wanted to contemplate, even if she'd been ready to strangle it not two seconds earlier, if by chance it had survived the fall just like she did. At least it definitely couldn't hurt anybody else now._

_By this point everything was either tingling, actually-for-real hurting, or ominously numb, but she ignored all this as she dragged herself toward the dead human. Its SOUL glowed with a rich red that exceeded any comparison to the blood splattered around it, a color that almost surprised Undyne. Wasn't red supposed to symbolize love? Whatever, didn't matter. It was a SOUL and it came from something that passed for a human, and she wasn't going to let the deaths of her friends and fellow guards and so many others be in vain. She stretched out her hand, but the SOUL shuddered back as if it was just as repulsed by her as she was by its owner, and she hesitated. The SOUL jolted and cracked down its center as if struck by an invisible hammer. What the hell..?_

_Before Undyne could make sense of what she was seeing, the red SOUL shattered and the whole world went with it, and there was darkness—_

       's body felt like it was made from wet cement, hazily perceiving the hard tile of the floor and little else. Shaking off the last of whatever dream that had been,        willed itself back into something approaching the right form, as best as it could remember; limbs, a torso, a head, some sort of face. The process took time, but it had time, and managed eventually to regain and hold onto something roughly the right shape.

And there, on the other side of the room, the doorway stood waiting for it.        smiled.

* * *

This relief didn't last.

The place outside of the room where        had been trapped was all the same in every way that mattered; cold, dark, dead. Long stretches of hallway led nowhere, or twisted back around to rooms that were either empty or full of objects that didn't matter, with no meaningful signs or landmarks to give any sense of direction even if       had wanted to backtrack to its former prison. It wandered with no destination in mind except  _out_ , and no idea of what that goal might look like, except for the flashes of another creature's life. They were getting more difficult to ignore.

_A cavern ceiling speckled with shining gems, and echo flowers whispering a hundred different wishes in as many voices... the table in Asgore's house, drinking tea from an oversized cup after a long training session... a snowy town strung with Christmas lights, sliding across patches of ice with Papyrus... hot sand, and a green salamander-like monster child scampering at a young human's heels as they headed for the shoreline..._

This wasn't right. This  _place_ wasn't right. Yet the memories, or fragments of dreams, or whatever they were, all felt... hollow, as if there was some feeling that should have been attached to them that was now missing.

What had happened..?

Eventually, in some isolated corner that might have been distant or might have been within reach of where it had started out,      stopped moving and curled quietly into itself, though it didn't feel cold and it wasn't scared. The outline of its body, already rough at best, was wavering and melting together. It could feel it. It didn't matter. It didn't care.

       wanted to scream.

       wanted to hurt something.

       wanted to be anywhere but here.

        didn't want  _this._

The burning feeling surged inside its heart, or its body, or whatever it was that it really had, and        shook with helpless fury, hating itself, and this place, and the yellow monster with her soft eyes, and the  _hurt_ she brought with her, and the flower, and it hated the aching empty memories from a life that didn't belong to it and that it didn't understand, even beyond the almost-familiar names that slipped in and out of its grasp. It didn't want to remember any more. It didn't want any of this to be happening. It didn't want to stay here anymore. It wanted... it wanted to...

 

_go back_

 

 

        woke up.

The outline of the tank's grating divided the light from overhead into rows of diamond-shaped slices with wavering edges. The filter hummed.        stared blankly into the light, and listened, and saw.

It stared up like this for a long time, uncomprehending.

Which didn't matter. Time was, as it had always been, the one thing it had in abundance.

       felt sick. It squeezed its eye shut, blocking out the whole world except for the feeling and sound of the water. Laughter tore its way out from        's throat and was drowned into silence.

* * *

* * *

In an aging stone house on the outskirts of the capital, in the dim bedroom where their unconscious sibling had remained since the day before, a Whimsalot named Cabbage had the strangest feeling of déjà vu.

Their flying stuttered, and they dropped onto the nightstand to regain their balance, which in turn distracted them from the magic they'd been working. The green light faded, leaving them blinking and rubbing their eyes with both hands. It had been much too long since they'd felt relaxed enough to sleep, and with no better explanation for their sudden uneasiness, they decided that they must have nearly dozed off for a moment, and scolded themselves.

They'd spent the previous night as well as most of the day before it in this room, poring through every book or article or magazine they could find on the topic of medicine. SOULs especially. The fact that Cabbage had resorted once again to healing magic said a great deal about the amount of useful information they'd picked up over the past hours, which was to say, absolutely none. The queen was the best and most obvious authority on the subject, given that she'd resurrected so many Fallen monsters during her tenure as the royal scientist, but if she refused to help then the only alternative was hoping that some other scientist had at least come  _close_ to a discovery like hers.

But, no. Nothing. It seemed that the queen's ideas had come entirely from herself, which was an intimidating testament to her brilliance but also entirely unhelpful.

The bedroom door swung open and smacked against an especially tall pile of books, sending them tumbling between the door and the wall. Two Froggits peered inside.

"Ribbit ribbit?"

"(We can sense your magic from the other room. How long have you been here?)"

Between the curious pangs of familiarity and Cabbage's frayed nerves, they could not help but feel as though the Froggits had asked this question before and would keep asking again, with the sole purpose of antagonizing them or terrorizing Lace, who had always been intimidated by their amphibian housemates even beyond their usual level of nervousness.

"...Shiver."

"(They, too...)"

Cabbage reached toward the door, and a  half-dozen phantom butterflies dashed themselves against it in a shower of white sparkles. The door crashed back into its frame with a perversely satisfying bang, and in its wake, Cabbage heard four webbed feet slapping against the floor outside as their owners bounded frantically away.

Cabbage flutter-jumped down to a pile of books at the center of the room, stuck the landing, then remembered that the book they had in mind was actually nearer to the bottom of the pile and set about moving those on top of it. In truth, their hopes of finding any new insight were dim at best, but they couldn't remain still and do nothing. This illness had afflicted both their elder  _and_ younger sibling now, and with the former in no condition help the latter, it fell to Cabbage to do so instead.

How and why it came to be that  _only_ Cabbage avoided Falling Down, for now, was not a comfortable question to ponder.

In the hallway outside of the room, the Froggits were hopping nearer. Cabbage quietly prayed that they would keep going, but the door swung open and they heard it hit the books again.

They came very close from entirely snapping and throwing an arrow at the door, but resisted long enough to notice a pale liquid pouring beneath the gap below. Their irritation disappeared, for the most part. "Oh! There you are, Reaper Bird."

The liquid's surface bubbled and rippled, pulling itself into shape like a wax figurine melting in reverse. Moments later, a large and vaguely avian monster hung in the air, looming over Cabbage. It twisted its neck with a swirling sideways motion that would have given an owl monster nightmares, then tapped its beak against the top of Cabbage's head. "IYtGocuow'ren'twlbbwoeieiohelngapbedully."

They yelped and rubbed their scalp behind one fluffy antennae. Reaper Bird's speech followed a familiar rhythm, but actually making sense of the words (assuming there were words in there at all, which wasn't always certain) was only slightly easier than trying to interpret dense academic text. They could have directly asked it to repeat itself, but guesses based upon context were less embarrassing. "What was _that_ for?"

"PiYRockuibbitingbitknrionowbthitem." Reaper Bird twisted its head farther until it had completed a full revolution and returned to its original orientation.

"You aren't taking the side of those frogs, are you?"

"YNMesoeow."

Cabbage huffed and returned to the bedside, primarily out of concern for their younger sibling but partially to discourage Reaper Bird from pecking them again. In all fairness, it had to be confusing, finding oneself not only physically transformed but suddenly in the center of a tangled web ( _shudder_ ) of familial relationships, but it seemed like being Cabbage and Lace's elder sibling should have trumped being somebody else's cousin, and they should have taken their side, just like always.

...Even if, realistically, none of them were entirely the same monster anymore. Reaper Bird was... like that, Lace's quirks had all become more pronounced as of late, and Cabbage had spent the whole time since Reaper Bird (or rather, the monster who became them) disappeared constructing an illusion of control. Their dynamic was entirely off-kilter now, with Cabbage suddenly the only one in any position to look after the others, to say nothing of the Froggits and Loox with which all three now had to share space.

"What should we do? I _won't_ just watch them die, but the only monster who might know how to help already refused. I don't know who else to ask," Cabbage said, settling down on the edge of the mattress and letting their feet dangle. When they looked up, Reaper Bird was apparently absent from the room, but the window had clouded over as if a very large monster had breathed all over it. They addressed that instead. "Do you remember anything about... then? The queen mentioned that she'd used some sort of SOUL power..."

They did not receive an answer, and when they repeated the question, the window began to rattle in its frame. This time, the message wasn't too difficult to understand. "...Er, never mind. I'm sorry."

Despite apologizing, Cabbage latched onto this line of thought as the only decent thing their tired mind had produced for several hours. The queen was obviously the expert on the subject of saving monsters who'd Fallen Down, but if she wouldn't offer help, then the Amalgams themselves would collectively be a close second to her, wouldn't they? It made sense. It made more sense than sitting in a dark room, watching Lace slowly fade.

Cabbage checked to ensure that their younger sibling was still breathing and in roughly the same condition that they'd been a few minutes earlier, frowning at the bare patches on their wings and the scales had come loose. Then they retrieved their helmet from where they'd set it down on the nightstand and stood up on their toes to touch the windowpane.

"Reaper Bird?" they said. "Can you watch them for a while?"

After a long pause, a hollow giggle rang through their ears, and a crude smiling face formed on the glass as if drawn on by an invisible finger. Deciding that that was as close to a yes as they'd likely ever get, they unlatched the window before turning back to Lace. They remained exactly as they'd been a moment ago and several minutes ago and for all the past day. "Don't... please don't lose hope yet. I'll be back soon."

* * *

_Find and consult an Amalgam_  almost instantly turned out to be the kind of plan more easily thought up than carried out. There weren't very many of them, and although Queen Alphys (who was not technically the queen by that point in time, but the royal scientist) suggested that their newly-extended families all stay in touch, that plan had fallen through as soon as it had been made. Or maybe it didn't, and the families of the dog and fish and snowy and funny round little Amalgams were all friendly with each other now, but Cabbage never tried to do the same. There hadn't been any immediate need for it, and being able to navigate interactions with strangers didn't equate to being comfortable with doing so, and they had to deal with enough of that at home. In retrospect, that decision might have been a mistake.

Cabbage hovered in front of the sign and squinted through their visor to make sure they were reading it right, arms wrapped around themselves and flurries of snow dancing around their wings. If they'd considered that they might need to venture as far as Snowdin, they might have brought a coat. It made no practical difference, it just meant feeling colder for a little while, but they were already exhausted in every possible way and it was making them even stupider than they already...

...No, no, nonono.

They fumbled for the doorknob and slipped inside the second library they'd visited in as many days. Lingering by the entrance, they fussed with brushing their clothing free of snow for a little longer than entirely necessary, glancing stealthily around the room. It was small and more importantly,  _warm_ , though its only inhabitants were a bored-looking child with scruffy feathers poking out from under the collar of a striped sweater, and a lizard with an equally detached expression who stood behind the counter. As with their visit to the queen, Cabbage left their helmet on; the illusion of confidence was so much easier to maintain from behind it. Also, the frozen metal was stuck to their face.

"Er," they said,  quickly discovering that they actually needed to move their face to speak coherently. They slid their fingers under the helmet's rim to try and fix things before the lizard monster noticed, which didn't work at all. "That sign..."

"Yes, I know."

"It isn't right."

The lizard monster adjusted their glasses. "Were there any books you needed help with finding?"

Cabbage managed at last to un-stick their helmet, though they might have lost a bit of fuzz in the process. It took them another minute to remember what they'd been planning on saying and then form it into words that might not make them sound lost or completely ridiculous. "No. I was looking for... um... I imagine it would be Snowhen? She is one of the Amalgams, and I wanted speak with her. I am not familiar with this area."

"Yes, I think I know who you're talking about, but she doesn't live in Snowdin. Her son was here for a while with friends, but... you can guess." The librarian lizard adjusted their glasses, the meaning behind their words no less obvious for being unspoken. No part of the Underground went entirely unscathed, but only Snowdin suffered such a complete loss of a single, specific demographic. Everyone knew the story. And now it was entirely possible that the girl at the table, who they guessed to be three or four years younger than Lace, was the oldest non-adult monster left in the town.

"I see. Do you know where she might be found? Or where anyone who might know, where they might be?"

"Sorry, I don't. Is there any reason why you need to find this person, specifically?"

Because dogs were scary, and a monster _made_ of dogs was scarier, and the fish Amalgam seemed only slightly preferable, and Cabbage didn't know anything about the little ones that buzzed and smelled like old coins. But that probably wasn't what they meant. "I need to learn about what Queen Alphys did when she was the royal scientist. I tried to speak with her, but she wouldn't... I didn't learn anything very helpful, and she wouldn't tell me anything about her experiments. Which." They wrung their gloved hands. "...Which I understand, I know that she's very busy..."

"Have you gone on Undernet, like, at ALL in your life?" demanded a small and unfittingly-musical voice that, as one would predict of a room with only two other monsters in it, turned out to belong to the girl at the table.

"...Excuse me?"

"Alphys made a Q&A post like a billion years ago and wrote all about the stuff she did. It's literally the first one you see on her page."

Cabbage's voice squeaked, which was unfortunate for any canine monsters that might still be in the vicinity because they were already somewhat squeaky to begin with, their usual pretense of confidence briefly forgotten. " _WHERE?_ "

"Undernet, dummy," said the bird monster, giving Cabbage a strange look that they barely even registered. "...On your phone? Or a computer or somethin', I guess. ... _Wha-at?_ " she added on at the end, apparently in response to some gesture from the lizard monster that Cabbage couldn't see.

They recovered some semblance of composure just in time to be embarrassed. "I don't... really know how to use either of those things."

(This was not, in fact, entirely true, because just as their helmet had once belonged to someone else, there'd been an incredibly brief period during which time they'd had a cell phone in their possession, courtesy of a friend. It never worked very well. It didn't work at all after Lace learned of its existence and acted accordingly. Cell phones were bad for one's health, apparently.)

"Oh my god, are you serious?"

"...Yes?"

Another look was exchanged, though again Cabbage missed exactly half of it. "Can I show them?" the girl asked, then bounced up from her chair so quickly that she left behind a little cloud of downy feathers. The librarian sighed and reached under their counter, then slid the phone in question toward her. She snatched it back up and motioned for Cabbage to accompany her back to the table, swiping through some option or another on the screen too quickly for them to follow.

"It's still loading but it's there, you like had to click through it at least once to make the notice go away. How do you not know what Undernet is? How old ARE you?"

"Forty-seven."

"Ewwwwwww, gross! Seriously?" she said. The librarian smothered a bitter laugh behind one hand.

"No."

"Phhhbt. I knew that." This didn't seem true at all, but then she flipped the phone around and offered it to Cabbage, and then they were much too preoccupied with that to care. Undernet turned out to be filled with menus and buttons they didn't really know what to make of, but the bird girl had already pulled up whatever it was that the queen had written, and Cabbage skimmed through every part that was readable without needing to touching the screen and scroll down, for fear of breaking something or vice-versa. It took two or three passes for the words to start sinking in. 

 

> _I extracted a substance from the human SOULs which I decided to call 'Determination'. This is part of what makes humans so powerful, and it may also be what gives the SOULs of boss monsters the ability to persist after death, but_ _ordinary monsters (like all of us!) who don't naturally possess it lack the strength and physicality to endure high doses. For that reason, while it made the subjects wake up, the injections didn't directly cause them to fuse together. Instead, it was a side effect of the subjects bodies trying to restabilize by absorbing whatever usable matter was nearby, AKA each other, until they had enough to form a more solid body that could withstand their Determination._
> 
> _(PROBABLY this should mean that they're much tougher than before, only don't try and test that out by fighting because that would Not Be Nice. @^@ )_
> 
> _From my own observations, none of these monsters are in pain and there doesn't seem to be any reason for them to live shortened lifespans_ _. This is not an excuse for being irresponsible, but I do want to be clear about what exactly happened so nobody has to worry about them..._

 

The message continued along that general theme—apparent typing mistakes and all—for a few more paragraphs, many of which covered points Cabbage had long since learned from actually living with Reaper Bird, and eventually ended in a sparkly pink signature. They frowned.

"'Determination'. I don't understand. Monsters feel that emotion as well," Cabbage said.

The girl shrugged. "Humans are different, maybe they feel it more? Or, like, something like that? Don't ask me."

"Then how is 'physicality' relevant to anything?"

"Hey, I literally just said..."

The librarian cleared their throat. "Determination. De-termination. It might just be a play on words."

As the girl went  _OH MY GOD_ loud enough to make Cabbage instinctively flinch, they carefully reread each word to absorb every bit of possible meaning. Asgore had been so much bigger and stronger than any other monster they'd encountered, and the same was probably true of the former queen before she disappeared. Interesting, but not really relevant to their own situation. Even if either monster was still alive, it wasn't as though one could just borrow some of their Determination and use it on someone else.

...Was there? The queen had extracted Determination from the human SOULs, somehow, without harming them...

A long talon tapped at Cabbage's knee, making them jump and momentarily forget their previous line of thought. "C'mon, you read it now. I want my phone back."

"N-naturally. Thank you for your help."

Once the cell phone changed hands again, the librarian motioned for the bird girl to return to their desk. "There, now you showed them. And that was very nice of you. You still aren't texting anyone until I say otherwise."

"Oh, come on! Dad said I could!"

"Did he really."

"Y _eaaaah!_ "

 

Cabbage continued to listen, but there was no ignoring the impression that they were now simply a bystander to some unrelated conversation about which they didn't know very much. Deciding that this was as good an opportunity as any to make a more graceful exit than they had while speaking to the queen, they murmured another  _thank you_ as they edged toward the door.

The younger monster's voice carried all the way outside, still going on about something to do with cell phones, until Cabbage pushed the door shut and was left alone among the falling snowflakes. They shivered in their thin dress, even the gloves on their hands doing little to help, the vague beginnings of a new idea forming beneath their helmet. Maybe not a good idea, but it was something. The queen definitely hadn't mentioned precisely  _how_ she'd gotten Determination out of those SOULs, of that much they were sure.

...Well, it was something. They would need to try talking to Reaper Bird again, and make absolutely sure that thy both understood each other.

They flew away from Snowdin along a bobbing path, buffeted by the icy wind, somewhere between worried and very, very tired, and some sort of determined.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Power move: Take weeks longer than intended to write a chapter, then literally just give up and don't even revise it.
> 
> For the record, posting a chapter a month is NOT the kind of schedule I wanted or plan to fall into, but things haven't exactly been ideal for writing lately. Updates should speed up a bit from this point onward, I think, but we'll see.
> 
> Anyhow, thank you to everyone who's read so far. This story will be completed no matter what, because I love my weird lurching baby and because I'm too stubborn to give up on it even if I didn't, but knowing that one's work is being read is always a nice feeling.


	5. Perverted Sentimentality

ENTRY NUMBER 15:

* Undyne doesn't remember much from that day.  
* I've only given vague explanations, since the full story isn't very happy...  
* But I'm also excited.  
* There are so many things she doesn't know yet.  
* Will she laugh when I tell her I'm in charge now, or that Sans has worked so hard to help?

* * *

Flowey

[FILE SAVED]

[FILE LOADED]

[FILE SAVED]

was about

[FILE LOADED]

[FILE SAVED]

to lose

[FILE LOADED]

[FILE SAVED]

his

[FILE LOADED]

[FILE SAVED]

mind.

* * *

Chara was back.

Not really  _back_ , because they weren't in the Underground, but in one instant Flowey had been practicing his impressions of different monsters in a patch of echo flowers, and then he was in the RUINS with a lingering feeling of vertigo.

For the first time in six whole months, Chara loaded their SAVE file. They were alive, not that he'd ever doubted that. And they were... well, what  _were_ they doing?

Given their nearly maxed out LV and what had nearly happened in that human village so long ago, Flowey had assumed that Chara would have gone on to kill humans to increase their own power. But human weapons were horrible, and if Undyne or even those mobs of desperate mercenaries in the Core could force Chara to draw upon their Determination to continue, then at least one human should have done the same by now... unless Chara had just played nice for months and months, out of curiosity about how the surface had changed or something, and only now had resumed their old activities... he just didn't know, and until they came back and told him, he wouldn't  _ever_ know.

When the wondering got to be too much, Flowey left the RUINS behind and traveled all the way to the barrier, hoping for a glimpse of the outside world through the gray fog.

He waited. He thought he could see the outline of the mountainside curving downward and the pine forest surrounding it, when the light was just right and he looked really hard, but he could have just imagined it all too. Regardless, Chara wasn't there. The light shining through the barrier turned soft and orange as the afternoon waned, and Flowey wondered if he should go back to the flowerbed. The odds of his friend returning at that exact moment weren't high, he _knew_  that, but he couldn't help it. They might come back. Soon.

And then he was beside the flowerbed again, the bright sun shining down. Confusion and excitement bubbled through Flowey a second time, but he didn't have time to analyze it because Chara immediately loaded their file again. He had just enough time to wonder if maybe he was imagining it, when it happened again.

And again.

And again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and...

When Flowey tried to move, he ended up right back in the spot where he'd been, as if nothing even happened. When he made a second attempt, time jumped back and he was under the ground and couldn't see a thing. He popped his head up, high enough to see, and Chara reloaded and he was back underground. He tried again, moving as fast as he could, and he was awkwardly stuck halfway, eyes barely peeping out over the ground. Inch by inch, he managed to return to where he'd been before, which wasn't really an improvement at all. It felt like being a character in a really awful stop-motion movie, the kind animated with those creepy clay dolls, at a fraction of the normal speed. Long before sun finally crawled past the thin slice of visible sky above, he'd figured out exactly what Chara was doing—not just reloading their file like a maniac, but reloading and then letting a few seconds pass and then SAVING and then reloading that moments-old SAVE and then letting only the tiniest bit of time pass before they saved again.

Flowey wanted to scream. What was Chara even doing? They couldn't be giving themselves enough time to fix any sort of mistake, and if they were in the midst of a fight, then the constant saving would keep them from changing what had gone wrong even a few seconds earlier. Were they trying to perform a RESET, but unable to remember how? Did they go crazy? Or were they trolling him until  _he_ went crazy, knowing just what this would do to him? What the hell was going on?

Unable to endure any more, Flowey struggled through the constant slip-sliding of time and burrowed deep down, curling himself into a tight ball of roots and leaves and trying to ignore what was happening around him. He had no idea how much time went by, or how long it was really taking, how he'd even tell. But dusk must have fallen eventually. As long as time moved forward, however slowly, that would have to happen.

SAVE.

Load.

SAVE.

Load.

SAVE.

SAVE.

SAVE.

Load.

Load.

SAVE.

Load.

Load.

SAVE.

Load.

 

They stopped. Eventually they stopped. How long it took for Chara to tire of their new game, and how long the respite would last, Flowey didn't even care anymore. He told himself he didn't. When the two of them were little kids,  _real_ ones, Chara always loved to tease him...

It was a long night.

* * *

Someone was coming. Their footsteps resonated faintly, like fingertips patting their way across a drum.

_MOM? DAD? ...You're shaking like a leaf! Is it your arms? They must hurt so much. They're all covered in... huh? No, don't worry, my parents will know what to do. Just sit, um, right on this spot, and I'll go find... ...Dad, over here! I found them lying on the ground, I think they— oh no, stop! It's okay, he won't hurt you! ...Wh-where's Mom? Maybe she should... l-look, he left, he's gone. You don't have to... oh gosh. Chara, be careful! You're gonna get hurt! Calm down. Please? ...Oh gosh. Um. Uh. I-it's okay, shh, shhh..._

_It was just a game, see? I was only messing with you. I didn't really mean it. I'm your best friend, remember? I just wanted you to... you know how we used to play pretend, and... no, please, I won't do it ever again, you win, I w-won't get in your way anymore! I can help you, I can be helpful, I can... I can... ...please don't kill me..!_ _—_ _As...ri...el..._

Flowey peeked out from between his faceless lookalikes. Out of the shadows of the cavern beyond came the familiar sight of a purple robe's hem rippling around a monster's ankles.

He looked higher, over the petals of the other flowers. His eyes bugged out, and for the first time in more than a century, he experienced the betrayal every kid felt after absentmindedly tugging on a woman's sleeve, only to realize too late that she wasn't their mom. Even if, in most of their situations, the problem was that they'd wandered off in a supermarket and not that dear old Mom was scattered across a floor somewhere while another monster ran around in nearly-identical clothing.

But what the hell was  _Alphys_ doing here?

Flowey snapped his mouth shut and went perfectly still, pretending to be just one flower among many as Alphys approached. A pair of Madjicks bobbed after her like a bunch of balloons, one chattering and chuckling to itself for no apparent reason and another surrounding the lizard with a ring of glowing orbs. There was a third Madjick, though he couldn't see it so well without moving, which stayed back and nervously eyed the hole in the roof from beneath the brim of its wizard hat.

Just when Flowey began to suspect that he really did lose it and was just seeing things, Alphys spoke up. "Th-this is it... this must be where the human fell," she said, holding her hands in front of her chest as if she wanted to fidget but was trying not to do it in front of her little retinue. Light glinted off the dumb little tiara she'd started wearing, and despite her words, she looked at the flowers the way someone might look over a cliff's edge.

The Madjicks answered, but Flowey barely listened. They were basically just a single monster in three bodies, anyway. The first went  _hee hee~_ and the second made some opaque comment about the sunlight. The last one, which seemed to be the only one with two brain cells to rub together, still seemed reluctant to move any closer to the place where Chara's new incarnation had appeared.

In combination, the scene was somehow even more confusing than whatever had been going on with Chara the day before. The descendants of monsters from the old city had lived in the RUINS until Chara came back, and Napstablook still wandered through the catacombs at times, but nobody else ever ventured past the door sealed by his mother's magic. Even Undyne at her angriest never pursued him beyond that point (though not for lack of trying) and Sans never tried at all. The RUINS were safe, untouchable.  _Home._

Alphys stepped obliviously onto the flowerbed, and despite his confusion Flowey instantly resolved to take her leg off if she ended up stepping on him. Luckily for her, she didn't. She didn't move at all, just standing in the flowers, in the sunlight. _Here_ , in the one location that was sacred, if any place was. Wearing robes that for all he knew, had belonged to Toriel before being cut down to lizard-size. And now she was standing over the place where Chara's body rested. His best friend wasn't there anymore, and he couldn't have felt anything even if they were; the love he'd felt for them was just a memory, as hollow as the dirt-stained bones beneath the flowers.

But it all still belonged to  _him._

A cluster of vines snaked their way up through the ground and between the other flowers, green against green, invisible. Whatever Alphys thought she was doing in this place, it wasn't happening. Not while Flowey was here.

Then he paused, rethinking. The one Madjick was still bobbling at Alphys' shoulder, the other two in separate spots a little farther away. Alphys herself was a joke, and Madjicks tended to rely on "unpredictable" attack patterns that just bored him now, but a trio of them might be annoying to fight at LV 1. Better to take them out first, then.

"It's... pretty here," Alphys said. Did she mean it? Probably not. "But I guess we'd have to get rid of the flowers, temporarily. For the trap. I also wanted to include a motion detector, since it could get too dark for the camera. What do you guys think?"

As she glanced back to the other monsters, Flowey slipped down and relocated to a dark corner of the tunnel leading out toward the rest of the RUINS.

"Hello..?" he whispered to the nearest Madjick, the nervous one. No specific voice—he had no idea who would work on them, or if he knew how to do that voice—just something squeaky and soft and obnoxiously crybaby-ish. They looked around and raised their magic wand. Seeing nothing, they chattered their pointy teeth and started to turn away.

"H...help... me..." Flowey moved down the tunnel and whispered. The idea was to lure away at least the one Madjick, but it stubbornly refused to be  _completely_ stupid and stayed put. Its strange little eyes darted all around as it raised its wand, illuminating the shadowy corners with a magic flash. Flowey had to back off even farther to avoid detection as he continued weighing his options. A surprise attack, maybe? Or he could try to lure Alphys off individually, though that would be tough now that he'd already...

Then he didn't just pause but completely freeze up, thinking of something completely new. And then a bunch of four-letter words.

Chara's remains. Bones.  _Sans_.

He'd said he was watching, and if not said, then really strongly  _implied_ that he'd do something bad if Flowey hurt anybody. And then what should happen hardly two days later, but a bunch of monsters coming to the RUINS, invading Flowey's home. He was never just implying anything, he'd practically ANNOUNCED that Alphys would come, and dared Flowey to try and stop her.

"...?"

"Ahh, w-what are you looking at?"

But. But it was still  _Sans_. And in that hallway outside of the throne room... maybe this was yet another lazy attempt at scaring somebody into doing what he wanted, like when he'd tried to make Chara undo everything they'd accomplished. Just a bluff. Nothing came of it then, but Chara was stronger than Sans and Flowey put together, and fearless. If it was just bluffing then it didn't matter, but if it was genuine then Flowey could be in trouble. The skeleton was beatable just like any other monster, but the window of opportunity for a surprise attack had slammed shut the instant Chara left the RUINS in their new body, and the series of events they'd set into motion was so different from Flowey's own experiences that there was no predicting what could happen next. Monsters sometimes did things you wouldn't anticipate when placed into new situations, and Flowey knew that better than anybody. Sans  _knew_ he knew that.

...But what was the point of these mind games? Sans never raised a finger to shield Papyrus from harm, so what made Alphys so special? Was he her pet, her bodyguard now? Were they in  _looove_? Eeurgh.  It was just awful enough to be possible, the two worst monsters in the world together, with Alphys all pathetic and lonely and Undyne... kind of out of the way? She'd been mind-numbingly boring to Flowey ever since he'd figured out that she wasn't a cool genetic mutant or the product of any sinister Determination experiments, but Alphys was pretty attached to the boring hero version of the fish and didn't see her metamorphosis as an improvement. Maybe that was it. Maybe Alphys was just keeping her around out of some misguided sense of duty, knowing perfectly well that her new science experiment was a lost cause, and in the meantime...

Even as the urge to hurt somebody became a hundred times stronger, the sight of Alphys approaching and the Madjicks' eerie eyes facing toward Flowey sent him fleeing instinctively to the safety of the soil below, holding his breath as if that would make him even less visible, or ensure that he hadn't been seen. Immediately he began to make excuses to himself—Chara was doing crazy things with their SAVE file, there was no way of knowing if he might get stuck in a bad situation, so it was better to be cautious and just wait. More strategic. That was all.

Flowey fled back toward the catacombs, half to avoid notice and half for his own sake so he didn't freak out and do something he'd regret, or start barfing everywhere. Stupid lizard. Stupid trash skeleton. Stupid Madjicks. Stupid fish. Stupid monsters. Stupid disgusting  _everything_.

* * *

* * *

 Scattered clumps and clusters of monsters walked or ran or fluttered or rolled past the spot where Sans stood, under a tree in a park sustained by magic rather than the diffuse light that just sort of existed wherever large groups of monsters made their home.

And the number of monsters in the capital really was huge, even accounting for all the people killed off or the kids sent to live with relatives in other regions after their parents died in the Core. Most of Snowdin's residents refused to go back home even after Alphys gave the all-clear, and an irregular stream of monsters trickled out of Waterfall and toward whatever areas still had enough residents for them to have neighbors, friends, any kind of company at all. A few settled in Hotland, but for those who couldn't deal with the climate, the capital was their only real alternative.

The Underground had problems, monsterkind had problems. Not the kinds they'd have if Alphys hadn't stepped up to the plate; the economy hadn't collapsed yet, nobody was starving, and they all had the reassurance of a plan and a hiding place, if the human ever came back. Most of the dust had been gathered, sorted, and sent in jars to the people who should have it. For a while, everyone had staggered around in a daze as they struggled to grasp the enormity of what had just happened, but that time had come and gone. There was  _maybe-you-should-be-talking-to-a-professional-and-not-me_ trauma and then there was the kind of mass trauma he'd witnessed months ago.

That second flavor was the first point of comparison that came to mind, and even then, it wasn't really similar.

A rock monster shambled down the street, irritably rubbing its scalp until gravel littered the path behind it. A cat monster with tangled fur and tired eyes moved in the opposite direction, fumbling through their bag without really looking at its contents. A monsters with a more geometric appearance vibrated like a nervous Temmie by the intersection between two streets, as if they'd completely forgotten where they wanted to go. A kid in a school uniform complained to their friend about a headache they'd had  _for, like, all day_.

Playing a supporting role for Alphys suited Sans for all kinds of reasons (rooming with a head of state: great way to avoid paying taxes, especially when your old job no longer exists) but maintaining the ability to keep a low profile when he wanted was one of the big ones. Today, though, it seemed like he could be anyone or do anything, and the other monsters would hardly be aware of it. Few of them said much, or looked at much, or seemed to even notice where they were going. It didn't read as the ennui of city life or that kind of thing. More like sleepwalking. One person like that was just one person; there was nothing surprising about a busy monster getting too little sleep, or a person being distracted, or having a headache. Two oddities within a short span of time might grab his attention, even if he ultimately dismissed it as coincidental. But anything past... frice? quice? —Anything past four times in a row was just overkill. A pattern, repeating.

So the next question: where did this come from? When did it start?

Alphys had seemed a little distracted that morning, the scales beneath her eyes darkened, almost brownish, but she was always jumpy when she had to interact with other people, even if she initiated the contact and she outranked them, too. Besides, _a little or a lot distracted_ had been her default state of being for weeks now. But that could be for all kinds of reasons, most of them perfectly harmless. She was absorbed in something he didn't know so much about, but the situation didn't infringe too much upon his life or threaten it enough to justify getting involved. Better to just wait for it to sort itself out.

(A pattern, repeating.)

A rabbit kid originally from Snowdin bolted through the park and between some flower bushes, his big sister sprinting after him. Sans kept out of their way to avoid being trampled, but chuckled anyway.  _heh._ Nice to see signs that at least a few other people missed the memo to act super weird, or also failed to pick up on it, or were starting to snap out of it. Who even knew.

...The flower, though.  _That_ did worry him. Not so much in a physical sense—it had never hurt anybody before, and while its lack of LV would make his already-situational abilities totally useless in some hypothetical fight, he was pretty sure it wouldn't change its ways now. But it had helped its human buddy do much worse than just hurt a single person, and its ability to manipulate time made it incredibly dangerous by default. And now Alphys was hanging around with it, the flower lurking in her lab, Alphys going off to visit in the RUINS. She was the last person to play nice with anyone who'd done what that thing did, but she was still basically its mom. It could be saying anything.

There was something else, too. The hazy feeling that hung cloudlike over the capital wasn't a completely new phenomenon. On the day the human showed up, there'd been a feeling of total despair. Like there was no possible way to get away from the thing without it finding everyone, like everything had been decided even before it began. Almost like déjà vu.

And that wasn't the first time he'd seen something similar, either.

(A pattern, repeating.)

"Cinnamon! Come back here!"

"You gotta catch me first!"

Alphys. She was ruling, or at least had been doing that job until she became absorbed in something else. But before that, and before the role had been rendered pointless with the theft of Asgore and the human SOULS, she'd been the royal scientist. She played her roles as well as anyone could, but now she was getting involved in something more risky than she might have understood, something involving her own creation. Sans wasn't doing anything, because he never did anything if he could help it, even as anomalies multiplied and the warps in existence became visible, however faintly. How lucky that all he'd have to do was delay a little longer, and then it would be too late to act, and the problem would resolve itself. Like they had never even been there. Even if you tried to go looking.

... _dammit._

* * *

It was just the paranoia talking, Sans told himself later. He couldn't keep doing nothing, even if as the day went on, people did seem to go back to normal, or maybe he just stopped fixating on an idea that might not even be right. Otherwise he'd get all wound up and freaked out over something else instead, and that wasn't good for anybody.

A direct confrontation was still out of the question. Too many unknowns, no promise of a good outcome; spooking the flower might end well but would probably end horribly, and the last thing he wanted was for his friend to end up in the crossfire. If it was just himself and the flower, or if it didn't have the home field advantage of being in the RUINS, which he'd heard about but never seen, he might have decided differently. Maybe.

So he'd snoop around in the second-best place, which had the advantage of being totally unoccupied. He'd wander around in the lab just enough to satisfy the need to do  _something_ , however pointless, and then he'd go home and sleep. Later he could talk to Alphys, in a straightforward way, like an actual rational adult.  _Maybe_.

 

Sans began in the generator room and moved outward, listening for the telltale hum of magically enhanced electricity from within the walls. The odds that Alphys really was building something that shouldn't exist were mercifully small, but it was good form. Inventions of the kind her predecessor favored used up obscene amounts of power, and since Sans hadn't heard about any crazy contraptions being built anywhere near the Core (beyond the usual number and variety of contraptions) it was an efficient way to prove himself wrong and justify going home.

And if he did find a suspiciously familiar machine... well, breaking something was easier than fixing it.

Without the Amalgamates around to liven things up by trying to chew on you with their... orifice, and most of Alphys' equipment relocated to the unfinished bedroom in the castle, the lab was as close to objectively gloomy as it got. The lighting was crappy and the air was probably stale, though he couldn't actually smell it. Sans moved systematically but without any special haste, finding and expecting exactly what he ended up finding: nothing much.

He'd covered maybe half of the lab's area and was considering calling it quits when light from the other room caught his attention. Not so much the fluorescent or  _don't go into the light_ variety, but tiny showers of glittering sparkles that did their best to reflect against the worn surface of the floor. It spilled out from the doorway some ways down the hall, the angle preventing him from seeing whatever might actually be within.

The Venn diagram of "stuff that's likely to try and kill you" and "stuff that's small and glittery" probably looked like two circles sharing a longing glance from opposite sides of the room, but even Snowy's mom tried to peck him once or twice. Sans slowed from quiet shuffling to complete silence as he rounded the corner.

Around the skull-like shape of the DT extractor fluttered an insect monster even smaller than Sans himself, its wings a luminous blur as it darted to and fro. It lifted the visor on its little knight helmet and leaned in to inspect the touch screen on the wall nearby, then followed the tubes and wires running from that wall ad into the machine, then actually grabbed onto the machine and leaned way forward to look inside. Then it jumped off and went back for another look at the screen.

When it became apparent that the bug wouldn't be turning around anytime soon, Sans inched up behind them until he could see the individual stitches around the back collar of their dress. Free from any limitations imposed by physical vocal cords, he dropped to an awful scraping bass and intoned: "I n t r u d e r . . ."

The insect monster let out a glass-shattering  _AIEEEEK!_ barely dampened by the helmet, summoning an arrow the length of Sans' forearm and whipping it around in a wild arc. Sans ducked out of the way to avoid a seriously embarrassing demise, hands raised in surrender.

"heh heh heh. hey, c'mon. i'm just messing with ya," he said. The arrow's point quivered; the monster's rapid breathing rattled in their helmet. "...ok, ok, that wasn't nice. i'm sorry."

The face of his fellow trespasser was hidden, and the lack of any expression to read left him mildly stumped for a second, but whatever, it wasn't called  _body_ language for nothing. Sans dropped his hands, relaxing. Slowly, cautiously, the small monster lowered their weapon. "W-who might you be? Were you sent by the queen?"

"sounds like you're up to something she wouldn't like," Sans commented. The monster had backed off in its initial fright, and he moved past where it had been to take a look at the display screen himself. Still inactive. "i hope you didn't try to turn that thing on. beats me what it would do to a monster, but probably nothing fun."

The insect monster (wait, no, the Whimsalot. Because of the helmet? How did that even work, did they turn back into a Whimsun while they showered..?) twisted the arrow between their hands and didn't respond.  _welp_. This definitely wasn't what Sans had in mind when he decided to pay the true lab a visit, but it was a little more interesting than what he'd actually hoped to find. Not that the competition was very fierce, since what he'd hoped to find was literally nothing.

"howdja get down here, anyway? the elevator's locked off." 

 "..."

"c'mon, kid, i won't rat you out. just curious."

Oh, they didn't like that too much. Their shoulders stiffened. "I am not a child."

"are you gonna back that up with a number, or keep being all mysterious on me? c'mon. i'll just end up assuming things." Kid or not, they did talk like a tiny old person. It reminded him of... ...nope, not going there either. But he did wonder if they'd picked the lock on the elevator, because that would have been pretty hilarious.

"...Eighteen. And, er," they stopped, then apparently went  _what the hell_ and didn't totally clam up. "The... vent. The elevator would not run, but there was a ventilation... shaft? It wasn't hard to open. Also, you haven't answered my question."

"fair enough."

More time spent here yakking it up with the world's most uptight tiny burglar meant less time before Alphys potentially finished whatever the hell she was doing and came back, potentially looking for him, but letting some random monster wander around and press buttons had its own issues as far as plans went.

"well, alph did sent me down here for maintenance. making sure all her stuff works, yada yada. which means i'm obligated to tell you to buzz off. like, on her behalf. ...in theory. i'm sans, by the way."

"...C-Cabbage."

"nice name."

A beat. It felt like he was being stared at awfully hard. No way to be sure on that one, though.

"welp. look, it's nuthin personal, but you shouldn't be messing around with this stuff. they aren't toys."

They stiffened. "I know that," they said, then trailed off and pulled their arrow tight against their chest. It was the quiet of a person working up the nerve to speak, not a complete non-answer, so Sans waited for them to finish for real. "...Wait. The queen sent you here to ensure that her machinery works correctly. Does that, p-possibly mean... do you know how _this_ machine works?"

"eh. kinda. what, do you have a human soul burning a hole through your pocket?"

"...Not... not _exactly_."

Oh boy.

Sans weighed his options while Cabbage clutched tight to their weapon and shot what had to be nervous glances in his direction. More time here did mean less time doing something he didn't particularly enjoy, but he was just putting it all off rather than avoiding anything. On the off-chance that Alphys came down and found them, this situation gave him a solid alibi and somebody to back it up. Another monster's presence was a little bit of a problem when it came to looking around for secret reality-warping inventions, but it wasn't like Cabbage would have any idea of what they were looking at even if he did find anything incriminating along those lines.

"alright. how 'bout you come with me and explain this one as we go?"

 

Sans soon learned more about his new little friend than he ever might've thought he wanted.

They didn't have a skeleton as such but an  _exo_ skeleton, and didn't know very much about the topic, but he was the first skeleton monster they'd ever met and so they thought he was very interesting anyway. They weren't too fond of dogs, frogs, or, as it turned out, knock-knock jokes. They were from the capital, though apparently the two of them had yet to ever knowingly cross paths. This was in part because they were a bit of a shut-in, ever since most of their friends, well, suffered the same fate of  _everybody's_ friends, family, whoever. They had an elder sibling who was now something like one-eighth of an Amalgamate (" _Amalgam...ate? I thought that the word was 'Amalgam' all along. Oh no._ " " _gimme 50 g and i won't tell anybody_." " _I d-don't have money!_ " " _uh, nevermind._ ") and this was somehow the least problematic aspect of their current living arrangement. But while things had never been ideal, their situation was never outright desperate until now.

"Do you have siblings, Sans?" they asked at the conclusion of their story. By that point, Sans had covered roughly 2/3 of the lab and was, if not chilled out, then less... un-chill? Meh.

"uh. nah."

"Oh. I see. Well..." they trailed off, the sparkly wings on their back a continuous pulsating  _bzZZZzzzZZZzzzZZZzzz_  that oscillated between irritating and strangely soothing, like one of those recordings you played to make babies sleep. "You might not understand, then, but... I am their elder sibling... so, obviously, I love them. But beyond that, it, it is my responsibility to protect them from harm. Even if there isn't much hope, or it seems dangerous, what sort of person would I be if I simply gave up? So... that was why I came here. I thought that if the reason Reaper Bird is the way they are, is because they have such great determination, then... if only there was a way to give just a little to Lace, then they both could live."

Sans mumbled some kind of answer. Cabbage stopped moving; he didn't.

"That plan is logical, isn't it? I know that I, well, that I don't know very much about anything useful, but I thought about it and I read things that the queen wrote, and it seems as though it should be possible. It might be possible. It would be better than letting Lace, j-just..."

He shrugged. He could've pointed out that it violated, like, literally every rule of medical consent ever, but... whatever. Just, whatever. That one word said everything he felt like saying about this entire line of thought.

"What do you think? You said that the queen sent you to this laboratory, so—"

"wait. do you hear that?"

"Er, pardon?"

From the wall to Sans' right had issued a faint creak, almost like the sound of a wooden house settling. Then Cabbage caught back up with him and their wingbeats droned, covering up the other sound.

"can you, uh, not do that?" Sans asked.

"I prefer to avoid walking... my legs are not very strong."

"well, duh. if they were, you'd be a 'walk'."

Cabbage stared blankly because they wore a faceless helmet. Beneath it, they still stared blankly. Probably. Sans waved them away, realized that was going to send the entirely wrong message even in the context of their conversation, then waved them  _to_ him and shrugged one shoulder. Shyly, they allowed the arrow in their hands to fizzle from existence, then alighted, hanging onto his jacket with all four limbs—less parrot, more baby opossum. Their wings went still.

The creaking was, now that he could hear properly, not just a creaking noise. There was, along with it, a soft continuous rush that had been impossible to hear over the competing background buzz of Cabbage's wings. It sounded almost like... the water pipes? What, was somebody taking a bath? It wasn't completely impossible, with that one Amalgamate who always used to play in there.

Sans continued walking, following the sound.

"What is that?" Cabbage asked, the bottom edge of their helmet pressing into Sans' clavicle hard enough for him to kinda-sorta almost feel.

"not sure. sounds like the pipework, maybe."

"I thought that the queen sent you to fix things. Don't you know what it is?"

Sans gave another one-sided shrug, this time with his other shoulder. The sound of the water pipes ran all the way down the hall and around the corner, in the general direction of the entrance of the lab. Long before he reached that point, however, he picked up a new sound, a steady rumbling hum like Cabbage's wings but pitched way, way down. He  _hmm_ ed and stopped at the last door before another stretch of nothing; the lab was fairly large but not infinite, especially if you knew the place decently well. Or you thought you did. He was pretty sure this was just an exam room, one of many. But he went in anyway. 

As the door opened, his first perception was that the room had been walled off with glass somehow, like one of those really elaborate planks where you built fake walls around a doorframe to make somebody's room look like a little closet. (Not that he'd ever tried that, back in the day.) But as he went farther into the room, he saw three more panels, edges, and the water inside. It was an oversized fishtank.

Faintly, Sans did now remember that one of the exam rooms had been retrofitted by Alphys to accommodate Lemon Bread, before it became extremely obvious that she didn't want to be confined any further than she already was, down in the true lab. Alphys hadn't made a big fuss over it, since being on dry land didn't seem to do any harm. The tank had been unoccupied ever since, not even filled with water. 

Until now.

There was the tiniest motion in the edge of his peripheral vision; apparently Cabbage was pulling on his hoodie. "I... I thought this place was not occupied. Sans? What is...?"

They finished the question. Or maybe they didn't. Sans wasn't listening.

Behind the glass floated a pale shape that was difficult to decipher as anything beyond just a shape. Then it stirred, lowering what turned out to be an arm, raising what he now saw was a head. The lumpy shape reorganized itself as a collection of curled-up limbs, a body, a creature, something along the line of a human's concept of a "mermaid" in shape if not any other feature.

Blearily, as if even the gentle light from his little companion's wings hurt its eyes, or as if it wasn't even fully awake, it blinked at him from a face that looked almost, but not quite, like one he remembered.

* * *

* * *

"oh jeez, alph..." Sans mumbled under his breath.

Slowly, as if afraid of startling the Amalgam—no, Amalgamate, that was the proper word—or afraid of it, himself, Sans approached the creature behind the glass. Cabbage clung to his jacket for reassurance even though it smelled like grease and sweat, but the Amalgamate didn't do anything. It stared at them, wrapped up in a posture that brought to mind certain unhappy moments now all tangled up with the scent of lavender and mothballs. The connection to their own past and its status as an Amalgamate just like Reaper Bird should have inspired compassion, but as Sans moved closer to the pale monster, Cabbage wished only for him to stop. Their head had hurt a little earlier, which they'd assumed to be a side-effect of sleeplessness, but it felt funny again now. Maybe the scent from his clothing was making them feel unwell, even through the helmet.

"I don't understand," they whispered to Sans. "The queen sent all of the Amalgam...ates, back home. Why is this one here, alone?"

Sans ignored the question, the bright spots in his eyes contracted to nearly nothing, just two white embers. He rested his fingers on the glass and said a name that was only vaguely familiar to Cabbage, and the Amalgamate either didn't care or didn't understand either. It watched as the two monsters approached, but without the slightest spark of curiosity or emotion. It was as if the creature was still alone in the room.

Its gaze slid away, and its eyes closed as it pulled itself back into a fetal position. Cabbage tried to knock on the glass to regain its attention, but their arm was too short to reach, and then Sans turned from the aquarium and nearly dislodged them as he walked away. He picked up a clipboard that sat near the sink, but when Cabbage pulled themselves up and leaned in for a look, they couldn't read a thing. The writing was all chickenscratch, and he flipped through it much too quickly.

Cabbage twisted back around. The gills along the Amalgamate's sides moved slowly, as if it really had fallen back asleep.

"Sans? Do you know who that monster is? Or... part of who it is, I suppose..."

"maybe."

"Then, who is it?"

Sans set the clipboard aside. Cabbage wasn't looking at that specific moment, but they heard it, and felt the motion from his arm. They ruffled their wings.

"do me a favor, kid. go back upstairs and call alph."

He was speaking with the same casual calm with which he'd spoken in the hallway, without a hint of the concern Cabbage would have thought appropriate. Something wasn't right about this fishlike Amalgamate, of that they were very sure. "I don't have a phone, do you remember that I said that? And, er... I am not sure what number I should use to contact the queen, either."

"ok. that's fine. you know where the ruins are, right? she's doing something in there today. door should be open."

"Th-the RUINS?"

"yep," Sans said, wiggling the shoulder where they still clung. "you don't have to tell her what you were doin'. just say i'm here, and wanna talk."

"Er... if you... if you think that I should..."

Now that they had the opportunity to leave the Amalgamate's presence, to say nothing of Sans' jacket, they were not so sure that they wanted to do it anymore. Sans had a terrible sense of humor and seemed to like jokes that made no sense whatsoever, but the thought of venturing through the basement of the lab all alone was far from attractive. Then again, being near the Amalgamate wasn't particularly enjoyable either, or any less unsettling than solitude might be, as unkind as it felt to think such a thing. Just as importantly, it would not be wise to irritate a friend of the queen. Particularly one who might be able to help them save their youngest sibling...

Reluctantly, they released their hold on Sans' shoulder and dropped down, wings fluttering away before they came anywhere close to touching the floor.

"good kid."

* * *

Reaching the basement through the ventilation shaft had mostly involved sliding along until they reached points where they could safely drop down, and so Cabbage originally assumed that returning to the main laboratory would mean making the same thing in reverse. That the vertical sections of the shaft might be too narrow for their wings to be of use had not occurred to them until it was too late, which was just as well because they didn't know how they would have gotten around the problem even by planning ahead. Luckily, the ridges between the layers of metal inside were just wide enough that they could find purchase while climbing upward, but progress was slow.

Whether they liked it or not, this left them with plenty of time to think about what they'd just witnessed.

Amalgamates had a vague sort of anatomy and could change their shape to a dramatic degree, melting into puddles or things even more abstract, but the Amalgamate currently in the basement only resembled the fish Amalgamate with one arm in the same way that any two fish monsters looked like each other. It was reasonable to think that the queen might have made two aquatic Amalgamates, just as she'd made so many small ones that all looked the same, but there was no reason for her to let one go and keep the other one hidden away in her laboratory after all this time. Somebody ought to have seen it, when they were all crowded down together in the dark. Or the monster's friends and family should have said something, once the rest went home.

The most sensible explanation was that the Amalgamate was new,  _truly_ new, possibly formed from some unfortunate monsters that had Fallen Down only recently. Goodness knew that there were plenty to choose from; isolated though Cabbage was, even they had heard the things people said about friends or siblings or parents slowly losing the will to go on. It was a kind of curse that had plagued their own subspecies since long before their birth. But restoring that desire to live required Determination, which the queen said was all gone.

...She  _said_ it was all gone.

For an Amalgamate to exist, there needed to be Determination, and apparently a large amount at that. An Amalgamate which they'd never seen before was in the laboratory. There was only one explanation that made any sense at all, but it contradicted so much else. Monarchs weren't supposed to be dishonest or self-serving, whatever Cabbage's more rebellious friends used to whisper about the queen's predecessor, on days when the lack of space or real light left everyone in a dreary mood. A good queen who'd saved the Underground and retrieved so many monsters from the brink of death might be overly pessimistic, or annoyed by a pushy little monster's demands for help, but she would never just lie, even if she had told lies in the past, before her coronation. It couldn't be true, Cabbage must have had it all wrong somehow.

But supposing, just  _supposing_ that she wasn't telling the truth, and there existed a supply of Determination, then there was hope. Whether or not they'd have the nerve to outright steal it, they didn't know, but they only needed a little. Lace was small, just a fraction of the new Amalgamate's size, so it logically followed that they would only need a small fraction of however much the Amalgam did. And then their life could be saved... unless it really was all gone. The "new" Amalgamate had existed before Cabbage and Sans discovered it, and they'd asked the queen for help only a short time ago...

The air vent took a 90 degree turn near the top, allowing Cabbage to crawl the last few feet before wriggling free and flopping unceremoniously onto the floor of the main lab. Their gloves and once-white dress were streaked with smelly oil, and what little muscle existed in their twiglike limbs all ached, but these concerned felt irrelevant now.

There was reason to be hopeful, but just as much reason to assume the worst. There was an Amalgam and it existed because Cabbage had  _seen_ that it existed, but its existence made no sense. Either the queen was pointlessly cruel or she was lying. Neither possibility was acceptable, but what else could they think? Oh, they had no idea what they would say to the queen now...

... _No_ , no no. They knew that they weren't intelligent enough to understand her work, or her intentions. Better that they focus on their task, and only then try to find out what had happened. There had to be a reasonable explanation for what they had seen. They needed to focus.

Despite this resolution, though, they  _still_ could not stop themselves from fixating upon what they'd seen. The trip to Snowdin the day before had familiarized them with the path to their destination just enough that they could not focus on anything except their worries, even though they'd promised themselves long ago that they wouldn't worry anymore.

 

By the time they passed through the town and reached the edge of the forest, they were already shivering, and as they reached the door at the end of the path, they desperately wished that they'd insisted upon Sans going instead, or at least coming with them, despite his confusing jokes. They even decided that if the door was closed but unlocked (assuming they could tell the difference) then they should just go back and tell him that there was no way in, which was probably true anyway since they struggled to open even an ordinary door. But when they reached the end of the path, they found the door propped open by what appeared to be a glowing orb, leaving just enough of a gap to squeeze through.

The RUINS, for all the mystery which surrounded them, did not present a very pleasant first impression. There was a long, dingy hallway illuminated by torches along the walls, and monster dust covered the floor by the entrance, which certainly wasn't a welcoming sight. But it appeared dry and powdery, old, and somebody had take the time to sweep it into a neat pile, which didn't seem like something a human would do if, by some horrible twist of fate, one really had appeared in the RUINS at the same time that Cabbage did. All the same, they summoned a new magic arrow and held tightly to it as they traveled along the hall, then up to the old castle.

This, too, was not a very mysterious sight after all, being nothing more than a precise replica of New Home. Or rather, they supposed, New Home was a replica of this place. Strangely, the old Home was just as tidy as its replacement, as if someone had lived here very recently. It was possible; there were stories about monsters who still lived in the RUINS, some of which might have even been their own distant relatives.

"Hello?" Cabbage called out, peeking into the kitchen and down the hallway toward the bedrooms. "Queen Alphys? Are you here?"

No answer came. They thought again about the big pile of dust in the entranceway, which might have belonged to an extraordinarily large monster, or to a few of a more typical size. But that was just paranoia. The queen wouldn't have come to the RUINS if it was dangerous, and her friend wouldn't have sent them to this place if he thought so, either.

In the little courtyard outside of the house was a single golden flower, swaying a little in an invisible breeze as it looked around the corner into some other cavern. The window creaked as Cabbage opened it and slipped out, and the flower twisted around, revealing a face at its center—two big dark spots for eyes and a wide blotch of an opened mouth, the kind a little child might draw, or like the kind Reaper Bird sometimes displayed when their body melted and assumed a rather different form than was usual.

The flower's eyes bulged for some reason.

"Oh! I have never met a flower monster before," Cabbage said as politely as they could, in case perhaps they'd startled it. "...My name is Cabbage. I was sent here by a monster named Sans."

The flower's smile twitched, stretching itself beyond the confines of what seemed physically possible. It let out a single, manic giggle, and Cabbage wondered if maybe they had said the wrong thing after all. Or maybe, if it really was a resident of the RUINS, the things it had seen were so upsetting that it was preoccupied even now. That seemed likely enough, poor little thing.

"He said that the queen is here. I need to deliver a message. Have you seen her pass by this spot?" they asked gently, but the flower didn't speak. They frowned, then realized what might be the matter and hurriedly dissipated their weapon. They hadn't been holding it in a threatening posture, but still. The flower didn't comment.

"Are you all right? I, er, apologize if this is an intrusion, but this is urgent, I think. Could you tell me where the queen—" Cabbage tried again.

Before they could say another word, there was a flash of light, almost like the kind that their own wings produced but harsher, and in a panic they darted across the room. Their arm stung, but it felt no more serious than a small cut, and then a hail of magical bullets pounded the floor beneath where they had just been. Gasping for breath, Cabbage looked quickly between the flower and the way farther into the RUINS, and then back toward the old castle, wondering if maybe some newcomer really had arrived to harm them, or even the little flower—

The flower's face was twisted in fury, and before Cabbage could begin to think of how to ask what had happened, their body slammed against the hard-packed ground as if they had been swatted by a giant. They landed with a breathless gasp, the air knocked out of them, and struggled to push themselves back up, but they could hardly move, could hardly breath at all. Green vines bristling with thorns as large as their own hands were wrapped around their midsection, biting through the fabric of their dress and crushing their wings against their back. Their arms weren't pinned and so they kept struggling, trying to twist around to free themselves, but their back and their belly and sides and their wings, oh, their wings all hurt, worse than any they had ever before experienced, and it grew worse every time they moved.

As Cabbage writhed and fought for air—even if all they'd do with it was scream—they were vaguely aware of a childlike voice shouting, high and reedy. At them? Why? They didn't understand, the flower had been right there and they hadn't seen any other creature, human or monster or otherwise, and the flower, why would a little flower monster just..?!

"You MORON! Do you think this is FUNNY? Is this some kind of stupid joke that he thinks he can get away with? Is that it? _IS IT?_ "

Cabbage managed a little squeak, black spots swimming across their vision. There was a tearing sound, some material ripping and it wasn't their dress.

"Does he think he can just—just push me around, and I'll just LET HIM?! 'Cause he CAN'T! Chara's gonna KILL you, _ALL_ OF YOU. Go tell Sans THAT!"

The vines reared back and flung them toward the wall, sending them bouncing against the window, metal and glass cracking together, stunning them. Every remaining instinct Cabbage possessed all screamed at them as they moved through the air and struck the ground, until they seemed to drown out even the flower's voice, and they all said to fly away from the angry thing before anything worse happened, but pain surged through the filmy chitin until they wanted to be sick and then stop moving completely. Nothing made sense, no part of their mind even worked except the part still telling them to fly away, but they  _couldn't_ fly. They couldn't fly. They could breathe, a little, though their chest hurt. They couldn't fly. They couldn't breathe. Not enough air. They couldn't fly.

They... couldn't... they couldn't they couldn't they couldn't they couldn't  _they couldn't..._

The flower was shouting something else. Their helmet might have been twisted around at some point, until their visor didn't align with their eyes quite right and mostly just blocked everything out, but a green liquid was spreading in slow fingers into their limited field of vision. Their dress stuck to their midsection; there was something warm soaking through it. They were going to die.

But they couldn't do that either, yet, they still... still needed to...

 

 

If another attack was going to come, then it never hit, or possibly Cabbage just didn't feel it. They had no idea of when exactly they lost consciousness, or that it had happened at all, but they had been lying on the ground with a flower berating them, and then they were still on the ground but there were other faces around them, yellow and white, hats and shiny glasses and too many voices overlapping each other. Loud. All so loud, even though everything around them felt so distant, the voices were too loud. None of the words made sense.

Even more distantly, some part of them was still aware of the shredded ribbons of their wings lying limp across the ground, over their back. Their wings...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy (slightly late) Underversary, everybody! :P


	6. NGAHH!

ENTRY NUMBER 19:

* oh god no please no not this not again no no NO  
* UNDYNE!

* * *

That bug kid sure was taking their sweet time.

In fairness, navigating Waterfall could be tough for a newbie, but the Riverperson was docked literally right outside the lab. Maybe they did get lost, or they just got cold feet once they reached Snowdin. Whatever. Alphys would show up sooner or later, and the delay was buying Sans the time he needed to cool down.

He should've guessed she would pull something like this, should've connected her regular disappearances to the time she used to spend sitting alone with that jar when she thought he wouldn't notice. Instead he'd veered off into conspiracy theory territory and screwed himself over. Again. And so now,  _again_ , it was going to be his job to just fix this mess somehow, even though he wasn't the one who started it. He didn't even like cleaning up his own messes, let alone the ones anybody else made... but he'd already accepted the task by sending Cabbage off to go bug Alphys, didn't he?

Dammit. Jeezus. If they didn't already catch onto the full meaning of what they'd glimpsed, they'd figure it out soon. Then what? They weren't the first to think of seeking her help, and she wasn't the only one to keep a jar of dust around too long. Nobody would be happy with this. Even if they'd liked Undyne.

Sans ran a hand across his face as he set aside the medical chart he'd been, at some point in the distant past, reading. His skull felt like two giant hands were squeezing it, thumbs pressing into his temples until just looking at the words on the pages made him want to find out what would happen if a skeleton barfed. His fingers ran down to his chin and he finally noticed that he'd been grinding his teeth—a bad habit from when he was a babybones. He relaxed his jaw and waited for the soreness to fade. Breathed in. Held it. And back out.

...Then there was, well... Undyne. She was always too self-assured to hide her emotions, visible-from-orbit crush on a certain lizard lady notwithstanding, and it was that bold quality his brother always tried so hard to mimic. Sans had no idea how much of that person was left, and the vacant emptiness behind her eye freaked him out to a frankly embarrassing degree, but his knee-jerk reaction was wrong after all.  _Somebody_ was in there, somebody with enough awareness to feel the kind of palpable despair that choked the oxygen from a room. He could've walked in blindfolded and still sensed it. What was he supposed to do with that? He had a little more going for him than the average monster, he guessed, but at the end of the day he was just a weirdo who played pranks on his friends and did math like a kid smoking their dad's cigarettes, hiding in the shed behind the house. He wasn't cut out for this stuff.

_in. count to five. out._

(Or was that just his excuse for avoiding responsibility?)

Sans quit counting. It was just old habit, anyway, from the time when he might actually flip out over a thing like this. It wasn't that he didn't care anymore, out of laziness or some other reason, but what would flying off the handle accomplish? The human, or the anomaly, or both, or whatever was going on in there— _they_ had the power to fix all this. Even if his efforts to get through to them in that last hallway failed, eventually they'd get bored enough to erase their crimes from existence. He knew that type. Then Alphys would lose her crown and turn back into a self-hating recluse, which was probably bad, but she'd be a self-hating recluse with a best friend who wasn't dead, and that was clearly a tradeoff she'd be okay with making. Undyne could go back to the Sisyphean task of teaching Papyrus how to cook, and the also-sorta-Sisyphean task of suplexing boulders for fun. Sans would be with his brother again. Or they'd all be replaced with new versions of themselves, if that was how it all worked.

The important point was that nobody would even remember, and while there was nothing he could do to make that day come any sooner, nobody would remember however long it took to reach it. They wouldn't remember anything, in the end...

The weight of Undyne's misery pressed against his neck.

 

 

Cabbage never showed. Neither did Alphys.

Undyne (or whatever/whoever was in the tank) didn't give a damn about his presence, which was understandable and also maybe due to her still being whacked-out on pain meds or something. But it did nothing to reassure him about her mental state, much the opposite. Quietly ignoring people was never her style, and the old captain of the royal guard would've snapped him in half and eaten him for breakfast for seeing her in a situation half as vulnerable as this one.

Without any better ideas, he parked himself in front of the glass, falling back on his tried and true method of doing literally nothing in the face of tough situations. Since she'd kinda-sorta acknowledged his arrival and looked just a little too tense to really be asleep, he chose to believe she was just fresh out of damns to give about anything; other issues aside, she was about three times as big as the fishtank's originally intended occupants, which left her hardly any room to swim even if she'd wanted to try.

Funny enough, Sans was about 99% certain that the fishtank wasn't bolted shut when he last saw it.

So he stayed put and studied her, since there was no point in playing  _koi_ and pretending he wasn't. She was a pale but reasonably accurate imitation of herself; one eye, teeth like a busted zipper, and stubby ragged bits where ear fins belonged. But those features and remnants of features were visible only in glimpses from behind her crossed arms, and without them—like the crayon-scribble hairdo or glasses a little kid would include to identify one stick figure as  _mommy_ and another as  _daddy—_ she melted right back into the tangled pale blob he'd first seen. Less like a drawing, really, and more like one of those snow sculptures Lesser Dog used to make, with lovingly detailed expressions devolving into sloppy nonsense below the neck.

Which, in isolation... whatever. None of the Amalgamates (the other Amalgamates? Was a one-monster Amalgamate even a thing, purely by definition?) seemed upset about their looks. And even the lack of legs was a small issue in the, uh, long run, with a robotics genius like Alphys involved.

The lights flickered, veiling the room in dark and then half-light and dark and half-light before settling somewhere in the middle. The droning of the water filter cut off, then rumbled back to life. A shudder ran through the-monster-that-kinda-looked-like-Undyne, and she squinted over her arm up to the ceiling as if to locate the source of the disturbance. As her gaze slid past Sans, she paused for just the briefest moment before turning away and putting her head back down.

Sans remembered those signs he'd seen at the aquarium way back when he was little, and since he couldn't remember  _why_ you weren't supposed to do it, he scooted forward enough to reach the glass and knock on it. Three times, politely, like he was knocking on a door.

Undyne/maybe-Undyne twitched.

"sup, boss," Sans said.

It took her a minute to trace this new sound, and once she did, she watched him with the dull incomprehension of a person still half-asleep. It could have passed for a flat  _what is this dude's major malfunction_ kind of look, sort of, so Sans took what he could get and smiled back. In other words, his eyes crinkled a little.

"hey. you remember me, right? y'know. that guy always hanging around papyrus' place."

No response. But he couldn't really justify expecting otherwise, given that she was underwater and he didn't even have lips to try and read. His vertebrae were getting stiff from holding one position too long, so Sans slowly stood, feeling her inky-dark eye following him.

"i'd ask what's up, but... poor taste even for me, i guess," he said. And then he didn't know what else to say, beyond that. All they'd ever had in common was Alphys and Papyrus, but they liked Alphys in two drastically different senses of the word "like", and Papyrus was impossible for any well-informed person not to love. Sans had a healthy respect for Undyne and tried not to legitimately piss her off too often, and she never pulled rank to get him fired even though she should have, and she quit trying to slap him on the back or throw furniture at him after Papyrus informed her that  _MY BROTHER IS DISTRESSINGLY BREAKABLE!!!_ , but that was as deep as their bond ever went. And then the human stabbed her to death. Twice. So.

"..."

She blinked. And maybe she didn't hold their lukewarm non-friendship against him after all, or she didn't remember it, or she just was in no position to care, because she continued watching him long after the point at which she'd previously went back to fake-sleeping. Or zoned out. Or whatever else she was not-doing. It wasn't much, but whatever, it wasn't nothing.

Sans pressed his hand against the glass. It felt kind of hokey, but not the kind of hokey that would be worse than nothing. He wondered if there was some other way to communicate with her. Signing, maybe? A few of her guards weren't verbal (unless barks counted) so it was possible she might have picked up a little, but he'd never asked. Maybe that was okay, though. Not all gestures needed precise meanings.

The two monsters considered each other.

Maybe-Undyne's posture loosened up by degrees, enough for her to flick her tail and propel herself within reach of the glass. One mitten-like hand poked at where his fingers rested on the other side, leaving a sticky spot behind.

Slowly, her expression changed. It was subtle, the kind of change you might see only because it was what you hoped to see, but overoptimism hadn't been a concern for Sans in a while now. The facial features themselves weren't quite hers, more evocative of another skeleton than even a distorted fish monster, but there was the faintest spark of realization, recognition.

As if solely to confirm that he wasn't imagining it, her mouth moved. Once. There was no way to hear anything above the mechanical drone of the tank, but he saw the one syllable.

"...yeah. that's right. you do remember," Sans said, and even though this was all pointless and whatever recovery of self she might make would just be erased once time unwound, the relief was like a weight lifted from his SOUL. This whole scenario was irredeemably screwed up no matter what, but at least Alphys wasn't unintentionally torturing what would've essentially been an infant cloned from her dead friend.

Just... just the friend, instead. Maybe.

Undyne watched questioningly, eye narrowed and mouth downturned in a familiar faint scowl. Despite the squint, there was still something slightly unfocused about how she looked at him, like he was standing a little farther away than he really was. What was up with that? Did the other Amalgamates end up with messed-up vision, or did this have to do with being underwater for an extended period? That made no sense, she was a fish, it was literally her element. Maybe it had to do with the room's size, though he couldn't remember ever being bothered by that kind of thing.

"i know. you'd rather see papyrus," Sans said, quietly. "...heh."

"i wish he was here, too. ...sorry. i dunno what else to say. maybe he'd know, but... whatever. i dunno. sorry."

Still nothing. Sans jammed his hands back into his pockets. Undyne blinked at him. The whole self-conscious shtick of talking to somebody that couldn't hear you was kinda dumb when you thought about it. Cheesy at best and emotionally masturbatory at worst, like some human movie character talking to a gravestone, a dead body, et cetera.  _ooh, look at me, aren't i compassionate and emotional for talking to myself?_ And was he, even? There nothing he could do to help her, even if he wanted; that ship sailed a long time ago, trying to help was pointless. Way too little, way too late. If Alphys couldn't convince her not to fling herself into danger, then Sans didn't have a prayer. No point. No point. Anyone could see that.

But she watched him with an intensity he wasn't sure he liked, any more than the blankness that had been there just a few minutes earlier. Like she expected something from him.

"alph won't like me being here, let alone trying something," he said. To himself. Even when Undyne made further attempts at words or maybe just noise, he heard nothing. She didn't hear him, either.

Yet it was like she really did hear, or maybe she just picked up on what he was thinking just from visuals alone. She wasn't dumb. As Sans backed away from the glass, Undyne burbled more and banged on the glass with both hands. Sans caught himself clenching his jaw too hard again. Tried to relax. It didn't work.

And even if he did, for however short a moment after entering the room, if he really did think about how simple the notes made it sound—bring the dead back to life, just add Determination!—then he didn't think about that anymore. His brother was safer as he was right now.

In comparison, Undyne...

...welp.

Judged, pinned down by that awful  _look_ , Sans remained balanced between two possibilities, neither any better than the other in the long run.

Eventually, with no easy method or strong wish to communicate what he planned, Sans left the room and tried his best to ignore Undyne as she frantically banged against the glass, unable to stop him. He didn't look back.

* * *

* * *

The aroma of butterscotch and cinnamon wafted up from the empty spot in the tin where a slice of pie had been cut away. By the doorstep, a monster lay crumpled like an abandoned doll. Bleeding to death.

Alphys leaned over the sink, not really in the kitchen or outside, or the RUINS at all. Her eyes were closed and she was watching the monitor, in her lab, waiting for another friend to die. It had been hours since Undyne collapsed to her knees and smiled  and disintegrated, and Sans just vanished again—he'd evaded the human before, but his brother was gone and now she wished she'd tied him up in a sack or sat on him or something as soon as he set foot in the lab, if that was what it took. Now it was Mettaton's turn, and while the mercenaries who'd gone with him all did their best to hinder the human's progress, she knew it wouldn't be enough. The human dodged or tanked hits like it was all nothing, their knife flashed red, and the luckier monsters turned to dust instantly. The ones who were just incapacitated, unable to flee or fight... the human made it uglier than it needed to be.

And then Asgore would be next, she supposed. He never did pick up when she tried to call him.

 

 

Alphys couldn't say how long she stood there, claws pressed into the edges of the sink until her nail-beds ached, looking down at the bits of white fur lay clumped in the drain. The unreasonably beautiful pie was still on the counter, and somehow smelled even better than it looked, though she'd been kind of lightheaded for most of the morning and felt queasy just at the thought of food. A universe or two away, a monster in a wizard hat floated in the doorway, speaking to her. Or, she guessed they had to be talking to her. Her name was in there somewhere, though the rest went in one ear and out the other and splatted against the wall.

"I'm sorry," she said. She'd missed most of what was said, but this was the same Madjick who'd volunteered to guard her during the venture into the RUINS, and their voice went up at the end. Plus, she'd literally sprinted past a grievously injured person, so it wasn't like the wizard was asking about the wifi password. "I was just thinking, ahh. That I should... uh."

The answer was close enough to on-topic, she guessed, because the looked only the tiniest bit confused before answering: "The green magic isn't helping very much. We, hmm... two of us tried to use it."

Oh. Right. She sometimes forgot that other monsters could just throw magic around whenever they wanted, free of the performance anxiety and self-doubt that partially motivated her interest in robotics, and Madjicks were especially good at what they did. Even so, healing a monster's SOUL only did so much to stave off the effects of physical damage.

"Okay. That's fine, we'll just have to. Uh. Do s-something else? Too?"

Alphys grabbed a dishcloth the size of a small bath towel from the cabinet, pulled open the utensil drawers in a row, then gave up on the pie when she couldn't find any knives. If magic hadn't helped then food wouldn't either, and shoving a slice of pie down an unconscious person's throat would only be helpful in the sense that they might choke before whatever was already killing them had a chance to finish.

Meanwhile, the Madjick looked like they expected something to leap out of the cabinets at any moment, and followed Alphys outside so closely that they bumped into her when she stopped to open the front door.

In the time they'd both been gone, one of the other Madjicks had remained at the moth-monster's side, while the other, understandably, hid behind the withered old tree in the middle of the yard. It was what she would be doing too, if she could, if she didn't have an obligation to take care of the monsters who were now her subjects.

Not that she ever did a very good job at that, but...

Despite her companions' efforts at healing, the mothlike monster looked horrible, their clothing torn and stained silvery-green where cuts and gouges still bled. The sight brought back images that had been buried deep in her mind for a long time, but she hoped the sick feeling might go away if she ignored it long enough. Something about this didn't match up with what she'd seen, anyway—though painful-looking, the injuries all looked too small to be from the kind of knife the human had used. Not that she was any kind of expert.

The Whimsalot also had a familiar look to them, though they obviously weren't one of the monsters who went with Mettaton to the Core. She had to have met them recently, but now wasn't the time for trying to remember  _that_. They were breathing only shallowly, the sound rattling ominously beneath the metal helmet, fairy wings shredded and wilted, a freaky version of those sparkly streamers on the handles on little kids' bikes. She wasn't sure which was the bigger problem, though there was no sign of dust yet. How much HP did this kind of monster even have, at most?

The guard-Madjick who'd followed Alphys out of the castle kept shooting nervous glances back inside. "This isn't safe, your majesty... _they_ might still be nearby."

"Who?"

"The one who did this."

"Oh."  _Duh_. Alphys grimaced. "There's no way another person would do this... and nobody should even be here except for us, anyway. And a human... well, we came in from this direction, and the door was locked, so. We. We would have had to pass by them at SOME point. ...I think." Unless they really were lying in wait, somewhere in the old castle, watching for some unlucky monster.

There was another reason to assume it wasn't a human, though. "Plus, y-you guys heard that voice. They said something about Chara, and, um, Sans? Which, kind of makes no sense. But they wouldn't know who they are, so..."

It seemed like the most reasonable thing to point out, but an uncomfortable silence settled over them all.

"You shouldn't touch them," the second Madjick stage-whispered from behind the tree, which would've been a funny image if somebody wasn't badly hurt. Even as they spoke, Alphys was already unfolding the towel and trying to put gentle pressure against one of the larger cuts in the small moth's side. "That voice near the flowers... the name, 'Chara'... it's a very bad omen."

She didn't have an answer for that one. Alphys slept in Chara and Asriel's old room, so it seemed to her that any evil ghost versions of themselves would be going after  _her_ instead, but she didn't know anything about omens, whether good or bad. Was that kind of ghost even real..?

The Whimsalot shuddered underneath Alphys' hands, startling her.

"H-hey!" she said. "Can you hear me? What happened?"

"We shouldn't have come here..." muttered the other Madjick.

The towel was beginning to soak through. Alphys folded it over and pressed down with just the slightest bit more force. The Whimsalot let out a pained squeak as she  _felt_ something give, crumpling beneath her hands with a wet crack. She gasped and recoiled, moving to cover her mouth with her hands before realizing how bad of an idea that would be. "Oh g-god, I'm s-s-sorry!" Even the quiet Madjick by her side grimaced.

"We aren't wanted here."

"That voice near the flowers... it sounded like it had been hurt. The one speaking. Whoever it might have been."

Looking again, it now seemed blindingly obvious that there was something very, very wrong with the shape of the moth monster's chest beneath their dress. Whatever had happened to them must have damaged their exoskeleton, cracking it badly. How would that translate to vertebrate terms? Broken ribs? No, not exactly, broken ribs weren't usually fatal. Now Alphys might have just made things worse. What could she even do, about the bleeding, or anything else? It smelled. Coppery, despite being a different color than what her own would look like. At least, watching from the monitor, she hadn't been able to smell anything.

Her hands were sweating, leaving damp patches when she wiped them against the bloody towel. What was she supposed to do? With Undyne,  _more Determination_ was a viable answer if only in the short term, but...

The moth shivered again and whispered faintly, " _flower.._?"

"The prince?"

Unconsciously, Alphys touched the hidden vial she carried with her, around her neck. Determination wasn't enough to stop the human at the bridge, and the lowercase-d determination of monsters like this one failed to help them, but all this one needed might be just a little extra time, a temporary solution. For such a small monster, it would just take a little. Undyne needed it more, but the amount might be so small that it wouldn't make a difference for her.

She really did consider it. For a few seconds. But then she'd have to find a way to explain what she was doing and where she'd gotten the vial, with three other witnesses right here. Memories of dying monsters in the Core haunted her now, called up again like _that_ kind of ghost, but she'd seen worse.

"Possibly..."

"A-are you guys going to keep talking or, you know, actually HELP me?" Alphys snapped, sitting back on her heels in one big lurch that would have sent her toppling backwards if not for the extra balance provided by her tail. She hadn't meant to sound so harsh, but both Madjicks did shut up. Instantly. Both froze up while the third chuckled nervously, like a kid watching their teacher yell at somebody else. "We, we need to get them out of here. R-right away. There's a hospital in Hotland th-that we might be able to reach quickly."

The Madjick by the door hesitantly approached, and even the one by the tree came out of hiding. Alphys wasn't a naturally intimidating monster in any possible way, but being covered in blood did tend to "help"...

* * *

They rode to Hotland in the Riverperson's boat, all squished together to fit in the small vessel. A lizard in bloodied purple robes, three wizard monsters in varied stages of fear or anxiety, and a small, damaged moth-monster swaddled in towels, like a babydoll that fell into a trash compactor. The Riverperson said little to them after they boarded, and did not make any comment.

Unless their song about needing to buy extra birdseed was in some way relevant. Which it probably wasn't.

* * *

"It was nice of you to, ahh. To stay here," said Alphys, keeping her voice low. Too low, it seemed, because the Madjick sitting across from her in the waiting room did not answer. They held their hat on their lap, pinching the wide brim and turning it over and over in their hands. Two little kids in stripes ran past, one of them banging into the side of Alphys' knee before they darted off again. She pulled herself in tighter, trying to take up as little space as she could. Spin, spin, went the hat.

"Because. You didn't have to. Not that I think any less of your friends for leaving! B-but I appreciate it."

"Please and thank you?"

The drumming of running feet stopped as the kids' mom snagged one of their arms and whispered, eyes on Alphys herself from across the room. She responded with what she hoped was a reassuring smile before looking away, and wondering just how committed her companion was to the whole  _only speaking in magic words_ thing. Since there didn't seem to be any way to ask without being mean, she pulled her phone back out and pretended to be reading, although she hadn't touched her Undernet account for ages and Sans, true to form, wasn't answering any of her text messages.

She sat quietly. After peeling off her bloodstained outer robe, she was getting cold, even though the gown underneath was thick fabric that fell to her ankles. She waited.

Funny. Public spaces like this one always made her a little nervous, even before she became a total recluse; it always felt like people were secretly judging her for her clothes or for talking too loudly or moving in an awkward way without realizing, but she knew on an intellectual level that she was being too self-conscious. Now that the receptionist really _was_ sneaking curious glances from over the page of her crossword, the old reassurance didn't hold water anymore. But for now, she didn't even care. Much.

Keeping the way into the RUINS open was a mistake. They'd all decided it was best to keep an escape route open with magic, because if the universe hated them enough to let a human suddenly appear  _just_ when they happened to be in the RUINS, the spell would dissipate with the life of the spellcaster. The door would slam back shut, sealing any human intruders inside the RUINS to starve. She hadn't counted on a  _monster_ trying to come in, though. Why would she? They had no reason to try, and no way to know the door would even be open.

Then there was the voice. Or voices, maybe. Curses and omens and those kinds of things seemed like nothing but the stuff of creepy stories, but  _something_ dangerous was in the RUINS. Not a human, and definitely not a monster.

_Flower..?_

Alphys stared at her phone until the screen shut off. Then she put it away.

 

 

The doctor returned, waving for Alphys and the remaining Madjick to follow.

A nurse shaped like a patchworked teddy bear hurried in the opposite direction as the three monsters left the waiting room. A spider monster brushed past them with several trays of medicine of some sort; down the hall, a SOUL monitor beeped.

After ushering both wizard and lizard into an unoccupied room, the doctor pushed the door shut with hands wrapped mummylike in white bandages beneath the sleeves of their lab coat. The sounds from the hall became muted, if not totally blocked out.

"Okay!" they said. "I'm sorry we couldn't meet properly until now, but, hello!" The Madjick waved, though the other monster's back was still turned. "My name is Dr. S, which is short for Sucre, you can just call me that if you'd like—but you want to know how your friend is before we get very social, right, your majesty?"

They spoke quickly even by Alphys' standards, and in the kind of aggressively cheerful, bubbly voice that always made her a little suspicious as a kid.  _Bubbly_  was a completely literal descriptor, too, since this monster's head was shaped like a glass pitcher of lemonade.

"Y...yes?"

Sucre nodded solemnly, which somehow didn't end with them spilling. "They're stable, first of all, so don't worry about that. Although I'm afraid... well, their wings are... a bit of a problem. Delicate areas like that don't always heal very well, particularly if they've already begun to heal up with magic. But there's no way to be perfectly certain about what could happen."

"...Oh," said Alphys. Beside her, the Madjick was cringing like a sad puppy. It seemed like that, anyway, since the angle of their hat meant she couldn't see much above their shoulders.

Noting their reactions, the doctor fluttered both hands. Slosh, slosh. "Oh, I hope you aren't... please don't hold yourselves responsible! From what I heard and saw, you both did very well. I'm sure they'll be grateful to you for saving their life!"

There was a nice idea. But was it even true? The Madjick tried to help, whereas Alphys... well, she'd had time to think about quite a few things in the waiting room, including just where she'd seen that Whimsalot before. She remembered now—remembered how they'd showed up at New Home just a few days earlier, asking for help that they didn't get. How they knew where she'd be today, she wasn't sure, but their reason for doing it was easy enough to guess.

Determination. It all came back around to that. Would using the vial have fixed the moth's wings, or would it have killed them? Would they have been angry if she'd used it on them instead of the person they most cared about?

The room was beginning to smell like an air freshener. Alphys made a face.

"...But, on that specific topic," said Doctor-Lemon-Scented. "There wasn't much time to talk, before, about what precisely happened. We were able to help your friend, but I do have to admit, those kinds of injuries aren't, hmm, something that I've seen for a long time. Their SOUL had sustained quite a bit of damage, too."

Alphys' mouth open but no words came out. She glanced instinctively to the Madjick for help as she tried to think, but was agonizingly aware of each second passing between the (implied) question and the answer she should give, like she'd been called upon in class when she was too busy doodling robots in her books to pay attention. What was there to say?  _I don't know_ and  _I'm like ninety percent sure it wasn't a human_ were right answers but also very, very, VERY wrong.

_Those monsters. In the Core. Alive but not for more than a few moments longer, their SOULS wrecked, breaking apart..._

"The prince. The RUINS," murmured the Madjick.

Poor Sucre looked as if the wizard had just blurted out a magical swear word or five, and Alphys pressed a hand to her face.

"I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that I understand..?"

"Don't l-listen to that," Alphys said. "We're still not sure ourselves—" ( _oh boy, the royal "we"!_ ) "—but we're going to f-f-figure it out s-soon. So! Ahh, don't worry! But also, um, maybe don't... don't let anyone go near the RUINS right now. Not that, ahh, you should be doing that, anyway..."

"Oh." Sucre said hesitantly, but even their gaps in speech were short. "Well... in that case, I can contact you once your friend wakes up. Maybe they can help shed light on what happened. Why were they near the RUINS?"

Because they were dumb. Because Alphys was dumb. Or the universe really did just hate everyone in the Underground. The doctor-monster sounded suspicious, but Alphys was also willing to make herself believe that that was just her paranoia and nervousness talking.

"That's a good question but, ahh, I couldn't really say y-yet," Alphys said. Then a new thought struck her, though that was a little too passive of a way to put it, since she would have happily started talking about anime to change the subject if she had to, and she didn't even like thinking about anime very much anymore. Also, maybe a little more importantly, it was... actually important. "...But, ahh, that reminds me! They have a sibling who recently Fell Down, and I'm not sure if they might be here? I don't know if they brought them in or not..."

A pause. For real, this time.

"I could find someone to assist you with that, but there are quite a few monsters like them with the same... condition."

Of course. Of course. Alphys pulled her glasses off to rub her eyes. "...Okay."

* * *

~~~~Alphys had just enough time to return home for a change of clothes before it was time to go back to the lab. Your day just flew by when you spent it dealing with the aftermath of a near-murder, as it turned out.

For just a second, she was tempted to ignore her duty and just sleep. Undyne was indifferent to whatever Alphys tried to give her, anyway. But it was the kind of temptation that she felt to hide under the blankets and just refuse to leave no matter what, or to say the most awful thing she could think of for no reason. The kind of thing you thought about for no good reason, knowing you wouldn't really do it. She wouldn't just neglect her friend like that, she'd done bad things but she was never as bad as that.

And even if she was, the idea of being alone in the castle didn't appeal so much at the moment. The room where she slept had belonged to Asriel and Chara, once upon a time. Their crayon drawings were still taped to the wall, and rows of their scruffy stuffed animals sat watchfully with their scratched button eyes. Desecrating that space by moving in seemed preferable to—oh god—to the idea of sleeping in Asgore's bed, where  _he_ actually  _slept_ , but at the time, the thought of getting attacked by hypothetical vengeful kid ghosts was just something to joke around about with Sans. Now it seemed like a real possibility, though it wasn't even the scariest one to consider.

That little whisper:  _flower_. Why had that stuck with her, of all things?

 

 

Sans was waiting for Alphys in front of the elevator.

Just as he'd shown up six months ago, at that very same spot. Hands in pockets. Eyes bright, relaxed as ever. Like everything was perfectly fine, though in reality he was no closer to being okay than Alphys herself.

She wasn't quite so happy to see him, this time.

"hey. seems like you've been busy, huh?"

"I did say I would be. In case you wanted to get in touch. ...Speaking of which, you really should check your phone more often." She did her best to sound perfectly natural, which went about as well as most of her best efforts.

"eh. haven't had service," Sans said. He made no effort to take his phone out to actually check.

Alphys clutched her hands beneath the sleeves of her robe. Without really thinking she began to inch over to one side, but there was no way to get to the elevator door without shoving Sans aside. She stopped, and waited, and grew more nervous when Sans didn't move. He was good at picking up on that kind of cue, even before she consciously thought of them, which meant he was choosing to stay in her way.

But he had no reason to suspect... well, no, he had to realize that she was up to  _something_ , lately, but she never mentioned a single thing about Undyne, or that there was any Determination left. It wouldn't be the first time that Sans acted weird just to get a rise out of her for the sake of some joke, yet the thought did not reassure.

Even if he wasn't, screaming and flailing and running away would do her no good, and the fact remained that Undyne needed her down in the lab. She'd already delayed much too long. And it was possible, still possibly. Most likely, even, that he didn't really know anything about what she feared.

"Ahh, so... did you. Um. N-need anything? Because this seems like a really r-random place to just, y-you know, hang around... eh-heh heh..."

Were the edges of his smile curling wider, or was Alphys only imagining it? 

"well... i've been doing some thinking. you've been really busy these days, and for once, i've even got my own important junk to worry about." Sans winked. "...so i figured now would be the perfect time to loiter around here and keep you company instead. you're up for it, right? or... down for it. that works too."

"Um. Th-that's. Something we could do. But, ahhh, m-maybe not... not right this second?" Alphys stammered.

"..."

"Sans? C-can you... move?"

"yes."

The bright points in Sans' eyes were fixed on her with laser-like focus, but the rest was just bone, inert and mostly unmoving, and her guesses at what he was thinking were only guesses. Alphys waited. Sans still didn't move.

Alphys dug her claws into the scales along the palms of her hands. "Are you mad at me for something?"

"i wouldn't be mad at you for nothing. that's just plain rude."

(Undyne. Undyne. Undyne. Undyne.  _Undyne_.)

She awkwardly scooted toward the door and Sans, as if maybe he'd go away and this would all just end as soon as he was out of sight. As if he wouldn't just follow her.

God. God. Oh god. This was a joke. This wasn't happening. She'd tortured herself thinking about this happening all along and somehow it was worse than what she'd feared.

"Wh-what do you want?"

"i could ask you the same thing."

"That's not an answer."

"maybe."

Alphys was close enough to reach the keypad, but just getting the door open wasn't really the issue. "...S-Sans?"

He slouched back, as if he might just doze off. Right there, standing up. She'd seen it happen before.

"how'd you do it?" Sans asked quietly. "the flower thing, that made sense... but this was straight dust. so, what, did you just pour in determination like cake mix? 'cause it obviously worked, somehow, but there's no way that shoulda brought her soul back."

So. That was that.

Alphys felt herself trembling, but only distantly. There wasn't anything she could do to change this. Just like you couldn't reach into a video screen and change what you saw there. It wasn't the same thing as being calm.

"How long h-have y-y-you known?"

"hmmm... a few hours. guess you never ran into my new pal, then."

"...W-what?"

"eh, just somebody. some bug kid i met. that's too bad," Sans said. "they seemed ok."

The spell that froze Alphys in place now and kept her from turning into a useless wreck all those months ago broke, and her voice quavered when it was supposed to be demanding. God, why was she so useless? "You s-sent then to the RUINS? Sans, they almost... ...wait, so you told them, too? When? Wh-who else knows about her?!"

His smile was definitely bigger than before. "nobody." His slippers, well, they slipped, quietly across the tile. He backed away as if he already knew exactly where this was going. "but hey, i'm no mind reader."

"Sans."

"what's the worst that could happen if somebody did tell somebody else, though? hypothetically." 

"SANS."

"sure, that could be embarrassing, but it's not like anybody would try and bump her off again. that's what you're worried about, right? that's why she's down there?"

He was gone in a blink, even before Alphys lunged for him, stumbling over the hem of her robe until she had to grab the wall to keep from faceplanting. She was breathing too fast, close to hyperventilating, overwhelmed by a hundred different versions of what would inevitably happen after something like _this_ did. Angry mobs, or just as bad, the quiet hurt and disappointment of people who'd already granted her forgiveness beyond anything she'd ever earned. Or Sans, the only friend she had left, telling her just how stupid she'd been all along—and there was Undyne, who she'd dragged into this without there being any possible way to ask. What would happen to her if something happened to Alphys herself? Nothing good was coming anyway, Alphys wasn't stupid or optimistic enough to expect otherwise, but at least with her help, it wouldn't have to be as bad as it could be, when the Determination ran out, and... no. No. No, no, no, nononono no.

Alphys covered her face, nevermind how far askew she pushed her glasses, hands sweating and claws scratching against her forehead. She tried to think, tried to think of anything at all, failed at that. Her scales hurt now, fancy that.

She fumbled around for the keypad and pressed it this time, powering the elevator on.

(Deep breath. And another. She had to keep calm. For Undyne's sake, if nothing else.)

Beep. The door opened. Alphys walked inside, waited for the door to close again. She pressed the switch inside to send the elevator down, then stepped slowly away, without turning around.

If Alphys had to give an explanation for her action, she might have said that she'd felt the displaced air brush the back of her neck, or strategically noted that there was only so much space within this closed elevator for a person to go without crossing her line of sight. The actual reason for her to spin suddenly around and fling herself toward the wall again was that she and Sans had  _both_ watched entirely too many anime shows where magical teleporting swordswomen delivered cool one-liners before stabbing their rivals in the back.

Her shoulder rammed into the middle of Sans' ribcage as her hands closed around two big wads of hoodie, knocking him back—she'd forgotten just how  _light_ he was, nothing but bone—until his skull clattered against the wall, and they both gasped. Alphys would have let go right then, but the shock made her hesitate long enough for Sans to recover, or at least, fail to show any impending signs of death, or fear of death. Not that she knew what that would look like, since he never seemed to get scared about anything. Or anyone.

"Do y-y-you think this is funny?" Alphys growled, or tried to growl, because she still sounded (and maybe sort of felt) like she was about to cry. "'Cause I d-don't care if. If we've been friends for a long time. If y-you ever, EVER try to hurt her, I'll. I'll do what I should've done to _them_."

Already big, Sans' eye sockets had somehow grown bigger. One of his slippers slipped off and landed with a little  _thwap_ , at which point Alphys realized she'd lifted him off the floor. Pinned against the wall, Sans dangled like a cat held by the scruff of its neck. She could feel his ribs move with his breathing.

"They hurt her b-badly enough, and she c-can't protect herself anymore. Now, I... I j-just... wh-what else do you want?"

Silence.

Then the elevator beeped again as they descended.

Without breaking eye contact, Sans gently rested his fingers around her wrists, slender bones cool and slightly porous against her scales. "...sorry, al. alphys. that was out of line, and you're completely justified in being pissed off. i didn't mean to... ...you know i wouldn't do somethin' like... that."

It sounded more sincere than nearly anything she'd heard from him in a long time, free of any humor or double-meanings or tricks that usually made her laugh and now made her want to do something that was probably horrible. He also had every possible incentive to play nice and sound nice, to convince her that he really was the harmless skeleton he always was. But whose fault was that?

The person who kept hurting all her friends, that was who.

Alphys let Sans go and turned away, her breath hitching. She hunched down to try and subtly wipe her glasses free of fog while he was busy fidgeting around to fix his slippers. She wanted to apologize, but didn't trust her voice. She wanted to say something that could, if not exactly break the tension, then at least reassert that they were friends, but didn't really know what to say.

Before she could think of anything, the floor lurched and Alphys staggered, nearly losing her balance for the second time in as many minutes. The overhead lights pulsated and then died, plunging the interior of the elevator into darkness save for the green flash of the emergency light by the door and the white dots of Sans' pupils.

" ** _WARNING! ELEVATOR POWER LOST!_** " announced a computerized but distinctly feminine voice. (One that was definitely  _not_ based upon voice clips from a visual novel of any kind in any way, shape, or form.) " ** _AUXILIARY POWER INITIATED._** "

"...S-seriously?" Alphys said, with the weird gratefulness that came with having an excuse for a cracking voice.

"welp." The green light flashed, on and off and on. Sans' eyes twinkled like tiny stars as he blinked. "don't think that was supposed to happen."

The part of Alphys that was small and mean and still not entirely dissuaded by what had just happened wanted to say something like,  _duh??_ , but she bit her tongue, knowing she'd already been mean enough. Resigned, she shuffled toward the emergency light and fumbled for the control panel. "No, but th-this has happened before. It's a hassle, but I can just—"

" ** _WARNING! AUXILIARY POWER FAILURE!_** "

Oh.

That wasn't a voice clip she'd heard in a while. Not since she'd put in the new alert system, in fact.

The exact implications of that didn't sink in for half a second, which was still probably longer than it should have been, but then it did and Alphys made a desperate lunge for the panel. Before she could act, the elevator car shook like a gift box in the hands of a giant bratty kid, sending her sprawling to her hands and feet. Sans stumbled too, tripped up by her tail, though she hardly felt him.

"oh _shit_." (That was Sans, not the alert system.)

" _ **EM TETHER STABILITY** **—!**_ " (That was the alert system.)

The rest of the warning was partially drowned out by a high-pitched screech of terror. ( _Th_ _at_ was Alphys.)

" **SEE YOU IN HELL!** "

Alphys and Sans rolled in a tangle of arms and legs and fabric and bone in the near-total darkness that had abruptly swallowed them both, before the floor pulled out from beneath Alphys and she screamed again—there was nothing wrong with the elevator system, she'd checked it and there was no reason for this to happen and why now, not  _now_ , it was just her luck that this would happen and what did the warning system just say, who even cared she was LITERALLY ABOUT TO—

Two bony arms clamped around her waist, and there was a sensation of immense weight as her vision went entirely black, this was it they were hitting the bottom at that instant they were OH GOD—

 

 

—both sprawled across the floor in the front entrance of the true lab, though Alphys had only an instant to process this new information before what sounded like an explosion shook the room, rattling the vending machine and the fake plants in their pots in the corners.

The sound and lingering vibrations died away, and all was quiet, except for the ringing in her ears. The floor was grimy but cool, and Alphys pressed her forehead into it as she tried to get a grip despite feeling like her heart would tear itself out of her chest at any second.

Nearby, something else was rattling, quietly. A blue-and-white blur. She squinted and reached up to fix her glasses, but felt only scales.

"A-are... are y-y-you hurt?" she asked.

The sound quieted.

"don't think so. though i guess i'd, uh..." (A shuffling noise, like Sans was brushing off his clothes.) "i'd know if i wasn't. you... good?"

Alphys picked herself off the floor and felt her face, the sides of her head. It didn’t feel like anything was bleeding or broken, exactly, but she couldn't stop shaking either, nor would her heart stop pounding. A thought nagged at her. The voice in the elevator, had she heard it there? Well, yes, because she'd programmed it, but she hadn't programmed it to say a thing like _that_. And even if she did, somehow, the way it sounded...

“…alphys?”

"I... I lost m-my glasses," she mumbled as she sat up. Nothing really felt broken, but the floor didn't seem like such a bad place to be at the moment, so she stuck around. The room still felt like it was spinning, but if it _looked_ like she had some kind of catastrophic head trauma then Sans would have noticed. They were okay, they were okay, they were both fine... "What j-just happened?"

"elevator broke. or... uh, something like that. unless you're asking rhetorically," Sans said. "not sure what to say about the end, there, though."

"Uh. I don't... ahh... really kn-know, either." She'd also specifically made sure that the elevator wouldn't completely fail at the same time even the backup generator failed, killing whatever massively unlucky people were inside. And look at how well that turned out. "Um." Alphys hugged herself, and tried to think. "Um. This is going to sound really stupid? But I think, ahh, either we're, um, cursed, or something, or there's some kind of... I d-don't really know what, but somebody th-that... ...in the RUINS, earlier today, that bug monster that, ahh, I guess you sent them? It s-seems like they got attacked, or, something. We heard this voice, and then... oh god. Oh no."

"wait, al. slow down. what?"

Her eyes snapped wide open. It didn't make the room around her any clearer. "Oh god. _Damn it._ "

"al?"

Alphys scrambled back up and, without another word, sprinted past the blurry blob that was Sans and raced down the hallway as fast as her long robe and short legs would allow.

 

The voice. The threat it made that at the time, didn't even make any sense. Whatever "it" was, it had targeted a moth monster first. Then Sans and herself. First a tiny monster that played dress-up as a knight, then two monsters that hardly ever used magic, one of which was so dangerously frail that any amount of damage, even accidental, might kill him. Now they were  _here_ , in the lab, where Undyne barely clung to life even with Alphys' assistance. All along she'd kept the lab sealed off to maintain a secret that, if she was being honest, Sans was right about—one that was for her own benefit. Because, well, why would anybody want to hurt a sick person, let alone  _Undyne_?

It had never occurred to her that Undyne would need to be kept safe from anything except her condition and her own confused and self-destructive behavior. And now here she was, completely vulnerable. If she'd been hurt, in all the time Alphys had been wasting on other monsters, other things...

Alphys skidded to a stop and nearly bashed against the door rather than bother waiting for it to slide open, the adrenaline from the elevator finally having found a use, Sans probably still standing around the lobby in total confusion, which she was aware of in the abstract but could not have cared less about.

She gasped for air, nearly doubled-over by the time she reached the tank, and looked up with her eyes squinted nearly shut, as if that might fix them somehow.

The details were fuzzy, but Undyne was still there, unhurt, looking back down at Alphys. Her face was obscured by pale lines running across the glass between them, radiating out from where her hands rested against it.

That was all Alphys could see. But she could hear water trickling down the cracked glass and dripping into a small but expanding pool on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S/o to Potato, who's been waiting for this one for I-don't-really-want-to-consider-how-long. Hope it lives up, more or less. :P


	7. Hum a Familiar Tune

ENTRY NUMBER 07:

* Sans always finds an excuse to leave or change the subject whenever I bring up his brother.  
* Maybe it's best to follow that example, and fully devote myself to helping the Underground instead of dwelling on the past.  
* I tried to do that, but I can't stop thinking about them, and I'm not always sure that I want to.  
* Undyne, Mettaton, Asgore...  
* This was supposed to get easier over time, and it isn't.

* * *

  _Alphys nudged her. "It's kind of overwhelming, isn't it?"_

 _Undyne started to protest. She would never be scared of something as dumb as not having a cavern roof over her head, and if she was then she wouldn't admit to it._   _But Alphys had a sheepish look on her face that made Undyne hold back just long enough to let her finish:_   _"N-not that I'm not, not, y-you know..!"_

 _And that did make a difference, because it wasn't so embarrassing for a total nerd like Alphys to be nervous. "Yeah, I getcha," she said. Undyne slid_ _an arm around Alphys' shoulders for a reassuring squeeze, which was something she'd done about a million times in the past (because hugs were like badass friendly wrestling matches minus the suplexes and eye-gouging, usually) except that_  now _she knew why Alphys always blushed. Because they were... basically maybe girlfriends now, right??? There'd been some downtime after the barrier broke and Frisk backtracked through the Underground to re-pet all the dogs, but it felt weird to discuss mushy romantic feelings with everybody right there. Alphys never said they WEREN'T officially a couple now, though, and they did almost kiss._

_But they could do that later, right? 'Cause Alphys was definitely into it, and after freakin MONTHS of trying to not even bring up the possibility... wait, what were they even talking about? "...But, hey, Frisk's a wimpy dork and they've dealt with it their whole life! ...Yeah, that's right, punk!" she added, flashing the kid a grin when they heard their name and perked up._

_Frisk blinked at her, poker-faced as ever. They'd stayed by Toriel's side almost from the the moment everybody left the Underground, clinging to her furry paw like it was the most natural thing in the world, and Undyne definitely heard the word 'Mom' leave their mouth at least once. As much as she wanted to dislike Toriel for what she did to the king, the sight of the human kiddo and old goat lady together was kind of adorable. It almost made you forget they'd only met, what, two days ago..?_

_Misreading the look on her face, Alphys poked her between the gills and whispered, "Be nice!"_

_"I didn't do anything!"_

_"You were thinking it. I can tell."_

_"Pssht. Yeah, whatever you say, thought-police."_ _Undyne bumped Alphys with her hip and making her giggle, which was maybe objectively the cutest sound in the universe, so she bumped her again and almost sent her flying by accident._

 _By the time Alphys had her feet back on the ground, Toriel and Frisk were already some distance ahead. Undyne waited until she was totally sure they were too far away to hear._ _"...What'll happen once we get where we're going, anyway? Frisk is happy and Toriel's just going along with it, but_ _they've gotta have actual parents. And human friends, too... somebody who's noticed they've been missing."_

_"Maybe they really don't have anyone? I've never heard Frisk mention their family.Though, ummm, it's not like I thought to ask."_

_"Me either. But I WAS a little busy trying to kill them."_

_Alphys hid a smirk behind her hand. "Now that you mentioned it... what happened back in Waterfall? I didn't get to see you fight, but I would've thought... I mean, Frisk's a human, but still..?"_

_Undyne groaned. "Let's just leave it at 'I lost' and move on."_

_"But what happened? What did they do? When I first met them, they looked pretty rough. Did they just run after you attacked?"_

_Undyne would've found some way to change the subject right then, thankyouverymuch, but another monster interrupted: "yeah, that's pretty much what happened."_

_She glared at Sans as he passed by, or rather, as Papyrus passed by, since he was the one carrying his brother._   _"Hey! All YOU did was sit at your station and sleep!"_

_"i figured you could handle the situation solo. didn't wanna get in your way." Sans gave her a smarmy look. How a guy with a face made out of solid bone could make any kind of face, well... ask Papyrus. But that wasn't the point!_

_"I WOULD HAVE if you'd... if they... ngah! Let's see how you handle THIS!" Undyne made a grab for Sans._

_"BUT, UNDYNE! AREN'T YOU HAPPY THAT NEITHER OF YOU MANAGED TO CAPTURE FRISK? HAD YOU SUCCEEDED, THEN... UH... YOU WOULD HAVE BROUGHT THEM TO ASGORE—"_ _Papyrus swung his brother out of Undyne's reach with a balletic spin on one heel, so that her claws just grazed his scarf. Sans peered over his shoulder like a horrible greasy gargoyle in a hoodie. "—SO NOTHING ABOUT THIS SITUATION WOULD BE ANY DIFFERENT, EXCEPT THEN WE WOULDN'T HAVE GOTTA TO BEFRIEND THEM AS WE DID. IN WHICH CASE IT WOULDN'T BE LIKE THIS SITUATION AT ALL!!! SO I'M NOT SURE WHY YOU'RE ANGRY NOW??"_

_"'Cause I forgot before and he's still got it coming! Now get back here!"_

_Papyrus darted ahead. Alphys yelped as Undyne scooped her up before bolting after him. "HEY, PAPYRUS! HAND OVER YOUR BROTHER AND I'LL LET YOU INTO THE ROYAL GUARD!"_

_ISN'T THE ROYAL GUARD BEING DISBANDED???"_

_"IT'S A REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LIMITED-TIME OFFER!"_

_"I'M FEELING A TINY BIT COERCED HERE!"_

_"NGAAAHHHH!"_

_Tall grasses smacked and rattled at the sides of Undyne's rain boots, and she cleared the remaining distance between the mountain's base and the surrounding pine forest in no time at all. Before she could go for a tackle, though, Asgore stepped out and snagged Papyrus' arm, stopping him from going any farther, and raised a hand to gesture for Undyne to follow suit. He must've been waiting there for a little while now, in the name of keeping a respectful distance from his ex and her(?) newly-adopted(???) human._

_Sans was, somehow, napping, right there on his brother's back._

_"Nothing makes me happier than to see your excitement to be on the surface, but now may not be the best time for roughhousing, don't you think?" Asgore said. "After all, this will be the first encounter between humankind—present company excluded—and monsters in many, many years..."_

_"Oh, yeah... hff... right. The humans."_

_Alphys wobbled and giggled breathlessly, grabbing onto Undyne's shirt for support after she set her back down. Her glasses listed dangerously off to one side, but didn't fall off. "Eheheh... oh my god, could you imagine? S-some human walking around... and this skeleton just runs into them?"_

_"THEY WOULD BE OVERWHELMED WITH GRATITUDE! THE OPPORTUNITY TO PAT A SKELETON ON THE SKULL... IT'S GOOD LUCK!_

_"i've never heard of that one, bro."_

_"IT'S TRUE! WHO WOULDN'T BE OVERJOYED BY THE GOOD FORTUNE OF ENCOUNTERING A FINE SPECIMEN OF SKELE-DOM SUCH AS MYSELF?"_

_"Yeah, they'd be overwhelmed with SOMETHING, all right." Undyne pulled out her hair elastic and scraped the escaped wisps up from the back of her neck. Asgore's words, though gentle, were completely right._ _Frisk's presence alone would go a long way in proving that monsters were friendly, but for all Undyne knew, they were about to meet the direct descendants of the humans who'd imprisoned monsterkind in the first place._

.. _.Hmm._

 _Undyne snapped the hairband back into place and ran her fingers over her new ponytail. If not for the little punk, she'd have some VERY different feelings about this little reconnaissance mission._   _Alphys and the skeleton brothers wouldn't be tagging along, for starters. No way._

_Toriel and the human caught up eventually. The goat-woman faced the air in the general vicinity of Asgore's face. "We should not delay if we intend to reach human civilization while it is light." Like he was supposed to just pull some more humans out of his pockets or something._

_For such a big monster, Asgore was pretty good at making himself look smaller. Since he clearly didn't want to say anything, Undyne went for it instead. "Hey, Frisk's the one that lives up here. Shouldn't THEY tell us where to go?"_

_Frisk's knowledge of the mountain's terrain was impressively bad, somehow even less than what Undyne would've expected from a kid who'd managed to fall down a hole in the ground, but it wasn't like getting directions was super necessary. They'd all seen the city in the distance while standing at Mt. Ebott's summit, so it was mostly going to be a matter of getting from point A to point B before the sun set. Frisk did mention seeing a house in the woods somewhere, with some kind of plaque in front of it, so that was also a possibility. Nothing they couldn't all have just stumbled upon by wandering around but hey, whatever, it would take way worse than that to wreck everybody's collective good mood._

* * *

"Are you still watching her?"

"yeah. she looks pissed."

"Okay, just make sure she doesn't hurt herself." The pointed tip of the yellow monster's tail quivered. "Ugh, I know there's caulk around here, I was using it before..!" On cue, she turned too fast and let her tail sweep out too far; there was a thump and the hollow crash as she smacked into a bucket full of supplies and knocked it all over. She hissed in exasperation.

(Alphys. That was her name. Alphys.)

"does she... do that?" the other one asked.

(Sans.)

"Ending up on the floor c-counts as hurting herself. Just, just trust me."

( _Beeping monitors, tubes red like molten steel pouring into a mold. Someone was nearby, moving with the self-conscious awkwardness of trying not to awaken a sleeping monster. 'Sleepy' didn't describe how she felt right now, though. More like she was a bunch of chewed-up gum recently spit out and squished together in the shape of a person._

 _...What happened to that kid? There was a kid in danger, she remembered jumping in to protect them, but after that..._ )

"i dunno what to do if she freaks out again."

(Worthless. A smug smile and all that potential, wasted, just like always. It wasn't that he failed to understand the need for help. He didn't care.)

Alphys tried to set the bucket upright, but it was full of long-handled tools that made it topheavy. It tipped as soon as she pulled her hands away. The noise rattled through       's semi-solid skull. "You have blue magic, Sans. P-plus there's the magic you did before."

"speaking of... that. how, uh, serious were you about the 'curse' thing?"

( _"Is something wrong?" "nah, kid's fine. if tori asks, we're just goin' out for a walk."_ )

The air against its face felt like a sunburn and the voices overlapped and overlapped until        wanted to smash its head against the glass to make it all stop, but it was in the center of the tank and swimming required moving which required coordination and even more sensory input.

"Kind of? It's what the Madjicks thought. Because we were in the RUINS, I suppose. We heard this... it sounded like a little kid, yelling all these things about... ahh, they mentioned you. And, um... Chara. And, killing people. That was when we found Cabbage, but we didn't see who was responsible. I thought they, or it, or w-whatever it was, that they stayed in the RUINS, but m-maybe it came here instead? I don't... really think it could be coincidental."

"wait, what happened to cabbage?"

"I told you, Sans. The messages should've gone through already, while you were upstairs..."

Sans pulled something from his pocket and looked at it.

(Alphys. Alphy. Sans did nothing but there used to exist a monster that trusted Alphys, trusted her with her life. Alphys would help. She'd fix all this.)

        tried going back, when it was alone, but it didn't work. There was no  _back_ , those memories of a different creature's life, they weren't real they had never been real,        had only ever existed here in this water here where Alphys and sometimes the flower came to taunt it with their own freedom. But then Sans and that little sparkling monster arrived and the sparkling one was gone, had probably never been more than a trick of the eye, but Sans was real and        had never seen him before but another monster, she did. She didn't have especially strong feelings about him but she  _knew_ him, and he existed at the periphery of events and relationships that she did care about, or used to care about. If he was real then what else was real?

Nothing. Nothing at all. The memories overwhelmed, most of them weren't bad or painful by themselves but they didn't make sense, didn't connect in any way to        's existence beyond the two monsters in the room, and there were too many of them. A secret door was open and only now did        know why it had been locked.

( _"Mama?"_ )

"welp. guess that was, uh. not a good call, on my part."

"No, but it... didn't turn out as badly as it could have. ...Yet. I'll h-have to th-think of something. God. Wh-why did you have to TELL them?"

(Could not show weakness. Alphys wouldn't help. There'd once been a monster who loved Alphys and had friends and had hope even when everything seemed bleak. She was dead now.)

"i didn't tell 'em anything. they got here first."

( _Alphys still hadn't said where they were or why, but her eyes sparkled as she sat at the foot of the cot, feet tucked beneath her. Whatever was going on couldn't be that bad, then, even if this place was all dark and freaky-looking..._ )

"Still. You could've... well." A heavy sigh. "...M-maybe I should have expected this, a-all along." Alphys picked her way around the mess and dragged a cardboard box out from under the sink. "You shouldn't feel guilty for what happened to them, though. There wasn't any way to foresee it."

( _"D-DON'T WORRY, HUMANS! WE'RE ALL FRISK'S FRIENDS AND WOULD NEVER WISH HARM UPON THEM! ...ANYMORE!" "my bro's right. they've been underground for days... either they're fine, or they already have whatever you think we do. all's you're doing is freaking the poor kid out."_ )

"yeah, about... uh, about that..."

       sank, clawing with fingers which no longer existed at the place where its left eye no longer existed either. The two monsters ignored it or at least Alphys was just busy rummaging through drawers while Sans did nothing but watch        and grin at its pain.       pressed its hands to its face until they lost their shape.

His clothing gave the illusion of bulk, but underneath, Sans was was hardly bigger than ( _green scales?_ ) ...a small monster. He could so easily be broken into pieces, reduced to splintered bone and a few scraps of cloth; imagining the sound warmed a hollow place inside       , distracted it from its own distress. Sans caught a glimpse of its expression and shrank down into his hoodie like a turtle sensing danger. The jacket's collar hid the bottom half of his skull, and with that constant, obnoxious grin covered, his presence was still irritating, but tolerable.      would have destroyed him if it could but it didn't care enough to hate him anymore. He hadn't helped, but he hadn't done anything bad.

Alphys was the one        associated with needles and the pain that came with them, the burning, and the confinement within the tank, and the dark place outside of it. She wasn't as small as the skeleton, but worried-looking and soft, in robes too big for her.        saw her as if for the first time and did not visualize so much as  _feel_ its teeth sliding through

_NO_

Nothing physically hurt, not even its face, but        recoiled as if from a hot stove, before it could even feel whatever it had touched. That Alphys was the clearest source of its unhappiness didn't matter. Some shard of whoever        had once been pushed away the thought it had conjured with visceral disgust.  _No. Not... her._

( _Why were they still running away? HOW were they still running away?! Alphys said humans were crazy-durable, but..!_ )

Not her. Despite everything, it didn't even want to hurt her all that much. But it still couldn't get out, couldn't escape this place and although it had managed to do  _something_ when the desperation to return to a different monster's life was unbearable, nothing happened. Nothing. It was still here. It would always be here. That other monster didn't exist, she wasn't real, she was dead.

_NO._

There was no point to trying to break the glass anymore, with nowhere to escape to, but       wasn't looking for meaning or purpose, just something breakable that was neither out of reach not off-limits. It barely saw the two monsters outside, or rather the fragments of them, split into a dozen pieces each by the cracked glass; the pieces of Sans didn't move ( _HE NEVER DID ANYTHING_ ) while the yellow and purple shards of Alphys fluttered all about.        started out slamming its hands into the glass but at some point hands became a shoulder became magic, or what would be magic if it didn't take time and focus that        didn't have. The glass splintered and Alphys fumbled with something on the tank's side, silencing the constant gurgle-bubble of the water. In a calmer state, there was a chance that        might have recognized what she was doing and might have tried to do something about it, either by getting farther away or even using the seemingly pointless  _something_ -power to go back to before the water was being drugged. Instead it slammed into the glass and tried to scream until the world slid out from under it and disappeared.

This time, mindlessness was almost a relief.

* * *

_Was it wrong to be disappointed by her opponent?_

_Undyne wasn't dumb or crazy enough to, like, WANT to come closer to losing, but the demon that murdered her friends and troops, that abomination that forced her to claw her way back from DEATH ITSELF to right what was going wrong, that thing was dead, and all she felt was tired, and too hot, and sore. A long and dramatic fight wouldn't fix any of those things, or bring anybody back, but... it was kind of anticlimactic to spend more time talking to the human than fighting them, that was all._

_The thing was strong, all right, and it even surprised her by snagging an energy spear from the air right at the start, using it to try and deflect the rest, even if the strategy failed in the end. That part wasn't a big shock, though. Mind control, mind-reading..._ _Alphys' history books were right. Too bad for this one that those powers didn't make them fast or strong enough to win. Heh._

 _Undyne slowly circled the dead human-that-wasn't-really-a-human. It lay facedown, bloodied, and with its eyes obscured it didn't look so much like a demon anymore._ _It didn't look evil at all—just human. A "they", not an "it". And small. Whatever was wrong with humans as a species, they loved their kids, and would grieve for ones that disappeared, wouldn't they?_

 _The thought didn't make her feel any better, but she couldn't pity a creature with the dust of so many monster kids on their hands, no matter how small those hands might be. Maybe that was why this didn't feel right? Ugh._   _Undyne dragged a glove across her mouth and grimaced, tasting blood and grit, then reached out to nudge the dusty toy knife from the thing's hand with her spear._

 _Getting rid of the human's weapon was more symbolic than strategic, so she practically jumped out of her scales when the hand_ twitched _. All that went through her sleep-deprived brain was something like HUMAN MOVING BAD STOP, and she slammed her spear down so hard that it went through the offending hand like hamburger meat, which was an embarrassingly panicky reaction for a captain of the royal guard, but pretty close to what she would've done in a more rational frame of mind, so who gave a crap._

_The wood underneath the human's hand splintered alarmingly and their body convulsed. After everything, the human lived. Barely. Undyne herself was proof that death could be optional, but she wouldn't have believed any creature could have so much of their blood splattered on the floor and still be breathing, if she wasn't seeing it herself.  ..._ _Though she remembered, now, that Gerson mentioned that kind of thing in his stories of the war. Humans didn't turn to dust when they died, they just fell over and quit moving, like animals. Everyone knew THAT, but what they didn't realize, he said, was how easy it was to miss little things; shallow breathing, fingers moving, signs of life a human would intuitively know to look for, but a monster wouldn't._

_Losing patience with trying to get her weapon un-stuck and seriously disturbed by the gurgling noises coming from the human, Undyne_ _summoned a second energy spear and telekinetically drove it through their skull_ _—_

* * *

[FILE LOADED]

_Before the human could move to block her attack, they were impaled through the side with one spear and then another in their chest as they staggered—_

[FILE LOADED]

_They swatted aside two spears at one and moved in to counter, only to be struck from behind—_

[FILE LOADED]

 _The human swayed to avoid the barrage of energy spears aimed at them, and Undyne kind of couldn't believe they were fighting in ballet slippers, but they were_ good _and she couldn't afford to get distracted by weird details_ _. It was a relief (not that she_ really _ever thought she'd lose_ _) when they lost their balance and—_

[FILE LOADED]

_Damn. Humans really were tough. For a while there, she was seriously worried that—_

[FILE LOADED]

* * *

 _This couldn't be happening, it wasn't happening, not like_ this _. Undyne had been preparing herself for the possibility of dying long before this human fell, but the end was here and it was here too soon._ _By now Alphys would have made the call and told everyone to gather in the lab where, supposedly, there was some secret hiding place beyond the human's reach. That had to be true, because Alphys promised, but the lab itself stood at the very edge of Hotland, directly in the human's path. It wouldn't have been a problem if Undyne stalled long enough, but the fight had been too short. This couldn't possibly have been enough time for Asgore to intervene after absorbing the SOULs, there was no time at all, in two minutes Undyne would be dust and the human would reach all those defenseless monsters as they scrambled for shelter, the human wouldn't even have to track them down like the rest. Those monsters had trusted her, somehow her very SOUL had pulsed with all of their shared hope and determination, but she'd failed them and now they'd all die. Alphys would die..._

 _Undyne mentally screamed at herself to GET UP GET UP, YOU HAVE TO GET UP, but she was already starting to break apart. Even a heroine could only push herself so far beyond her limits before her body decided it was just done with this crap, even if she herself wasn't, and Undyne was no heroine anyway._ _The human trudged closer, the weird grace of their fighting all drained away, but there was nothing left to do except wait for them to end this._ _She couldn't even yell or swear at the shambling thing as they stood over her. Was Alphys watching? ...Please, let her not be watching this. Let her escape, use this time to escape, run, hide..._

 _No final attack ever came. Undyne began to wonder if they were dragging this out on purpose, a suspicion that seemed to be right on the money when the human crouched down on all fours to peer directly into her face. She glared back, and would've spit at them if her mouth didn't feel like she'd been gargling sand. And yet, somehow, she also got the feeling that they wouldn't even notice if she did it_ _. From beneath their mop of brown hair, their eyes were just... nothing, there was nothing in them. No compassion, mercy—as if she'd EVER want it—or even that festering hatred from when they'd tried to strike down that little monster kid._

 _Did they want to say something? If they were getting some sadistic pleasure from watching her die, they were being awfully restrained with the gloating. Or was it guilty, some itty bitty twinge of remorse in the depths of their rotten SOUL?_ _Great timing, there. Great..._ fucking _timing. Would've been nice if they decided that murder was icky a little earlier._ _...Though_ _if the human_ _really did regret their actions, maybe from now on, they'd..._ _...no. It was a pathetic thing to hope for, and it wasn't gonna happen. Alphys, her friends, everyone, they deserved better than that..._ _she couldn't let this happen._

 _Okay. So physical movement was out of the question, but the human's creepy inexplicable behavior gave her enough time to think of something else, the only other thing she could do. Undyne mustered a last gasp of magic, funneling the power remaining_ _in her SOUL—there had to be_ something _l_ _eft, if there was nothing then she would've turned to dust by now—and pushing it at the human, the thing wearing a human's skin._

 _Two things happened: first, her body melted and her SOUL didn't just break, it vaporized. That was okay. It was what "should" have happened awhile ago, anyway. (Hey, look what monsters could do when they believed in themselves!) Secondly, and more importantly, there was a flash of blue light as magic energy splashed into the human's eyes._ _The attack was pitifully weak in terms of damage, less than what little guppy-Undyne could do before Asgore's training; if the human hadn't moronically put themselves in a position like this, it might've done nothing but momentarily annoy them. But at that same moment, as if sensing her intentions, the human was already sitting up and pulling the knife back._ _Off-guard, and already moving in the direction she wanted, all they had to do was jolt a little, and that was enough to tip them too far back. Their arms flailed out too late to catch anything, and they fell._

_...Heh. Heh. Heh._

_With more time, she would have thought a silent apology to everyone, but she turned to soggy dust as the human's body hit the ground with a crunch_ _—_

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* * *

 _They barely tried to block anything, throwing themselves at Undyne with a fury that would terrify any other monster. But she wasn't afraid of ANYTHING and they were careless, an easy target, easy to strike down_ _—_

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* * *

_The red SOUL shattered—_

* * *

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* * *

 _The red SOUL shattered—_  

* * *

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* * *

_The red SOUL shattered..._

* * *

The cracks weren't exactly gone, but they were all filled in with some pliant material that       couldn't pick apart. Its hands just squished into the glass when it tried.

Escape didn't appeal so much with Sans out of sight, anyway; it could bring him and Alphys back with the power it had discovered, but nothing worthwhile happened. The glass splintered and Alphys drugged the water, then left. The sensation of losing consciousness wasn't pleasant and the dreams weren't any better, so it gave up.

       swam in circles, and slept more, and wet back to swimming, then forgot why it decided to leave the glass alone and hit is some more. It kept doing that even after remembering, for a while, just because it felt good.

( _Toriel spread Asgore's cape out on the grass like a blanket, but Frisk insisted they weren't tired, and in the time Toriel spent trying to entice them into it, Sans claimed the spot and sprawled out for a nap. They leaned against him as they picked at the leaf of a dandelion poking up from beneath the cape's edge, fingers methodically moving until their names turned green. Alphys clutched her phone, its screen reflecting on the lenses of her glasses while Papyrus spoke—mostly with his hands—about puzzles, or something._

 _In the clearing on the opposite side of the path, the window of the research station or whatever-it-was glowed yellow in the dusk. The human hadn't so much stuck their head out the door to see if the coast was clear, in all the time the group had been waiting. Undyne knew, because she'd been watching both them and the road this whole time. It was too far to see, but_ _she imagined them ducking beneath the window, still quaking in terror at the human kid that appeared on their doorstep. Plus a bunch of monsters, too, but..._ )

Alphys and Sans came back. They didn't go through the doorway but popped out of nowhere, like the flower. Sans took up his old spot while Alphys bustled about, doing the same things she usually did; she acted very interested in the little boxes mounted on the side of the tank, monitors of some kind, and she offered food        didn't want, and she climbed up to check the filter, and tried to talk to       .

Her presence was, somehow, even more uncomfortable and confusing than usual.        stayed away, moving to the bottom of the tank where her face blurred out entirely, and pretended she wasn't there.

( _"I never told you before... f-for a lot of reasons, but there's, this, ahh..." "You don't have to tell me, Alphy. Actually, it's better that you don't. As long as I don't know where it is, the human can't read my mind to find it out!"_ _"Um... y-y-yeah! That's. That's true. G-good point."_ )

Alphys and Sans vanished, eventually, but they came back later. Alphys poked at the boxes and checked the filter and watched       , fingers locked together. Sans did nothing, he just stood there. Then they'd leave and come back and leave and come back, no need for        to do anything to make it so.

The only difference from the old routine, aside from Sans' presence and the way he and Alphys just appeared and disappeared, was that        didn't see the flower anymore.

* * *

Alphys was writing something; Sans rested his elbows on the topmost rung of the ladder, perched uncomfortably close to       . It could have submerged to put more distance between them, but then it wouldn't be able to hear. The semblances of interactions it shared with Alphys and Sans weren't enjoyable, but neither was swimming in circles or banging its head against the glass.

"alph."

From below: "Yeah?"

"y'know, she's... there may be no way to say this without sending the wrong message, but..."

"...She hates me." There was a brittle quality to her voice that        didn't like. Wished she would stop. "And you think this is a bad idea. ...I don't like it either, Sans. So if you can think of an alternative, some other way to help her, t-tell me."

( _"Th-they're... I think they're scared we'll make all of them sick!" "What?!" "That's what th-those masks are for, that's why they don't want Frisk near them..!"_ )

Alphys examined the sealed-up cracks in the glass, touching them with her fingers.

"...howsabout waterfall?" Sans asked. "it won't fix anything, per se, but she wouldn't be stuck down here. her and lemon bread can hang out."

( _The dog monster—dog monsters?—leaned into Undyne, its full weight enough to snap a lesser monster in half, which meant she had to readjust her stance to maintain her balance. Not that she wasn't strong enough to pick it right up if she wanted, but it made Greater Dog look like a runt and STILL was way heavier than it looked. "Wait, run this by me again."_

_"They're... still all the same monsters, fundamentally. Just, their SOULS are all... mushed together. ...M-maybe Endogeny isn't the best example."_

_Undyne scratched somewhere around where Endogeny's chin would be on a typical dog, brow furrowed as she processed this. The dog(s???) vibrated with what Alphys told her was happiness. "'Cause of this 'Determination' stuff. Okay. So, they're not really new monsters? Just the same people, but they... look like this, now?"_

_"It's hard to say... but, maybe both? You can see it when they use magic... they still can do some things they always could, but a lot of times, it's... weird. I guess you would have to ask one to be sure. About the, um. The philosophical... stuff. Maybe Shyren's sister?"_ )

       's head hurt. It ducked beneath the water to give its skin a short reprieve from the air, which also helped its head a little. By the time it came back up, it lost track of whatever the monsters were saying, and absorbed even less than it usually did. Words flowed past like a school of tiny fish; reach for any of them, and they all scatter.

" _—_ not even the issue, really. Moving her out of here would be t-too dangerous."

"what does she think?"

Alphys didn't look at him. "...Ask her, not me. It's rude to t-talk about someone that's listening, you know."

"can she even... ...uh, forget it. hey, undyne?"

It ignored him.

( _"beep boop," Sans mumbled over his brother's shoulder, awake after all. "we come in peace. take us to your leader."_

 _Alphys giggled and Undyne had to squash a hand over her mouth to keep from busting out laughing just because of Alphys plus the look on Toriel's face. Poor human, this really was turning into a shitshow. Nice job, Toriel. But hey, as long as they had Frisk here..._ )

The ladder creaked.        let Sans wait and wait for an answer without getting one. It was a good feeling.

"welp, whatever. that's all i got."

"It wasn't a bad suggestion, or anything. Just... I don't w-want you to think I'm being lazy, or something."

"i wouldn't say that. even if i would, well... pot, kettle, et cetera. you ready to split?"

Alphys must've made some sign, because the skeleton slithered down from the ladder and rejoined her.        pretended neither were there, and by the time it looked away from the wall, they really weren't, and        was alone with its own mangled thoughts.

It swam in circles. It slept. It stopped moving ( _the house with the tree in front, was it still there?_ ) or doing anything at all.

* * *

Dusty water made its gills itch. Dust fell away from its skin as it swam. Alphys and Sans came and went and came and went and       felt itself crumbling even when it didn't move. The dust was everywhere, and the few distractions         had at its disposal were just as bad. What began as a slight discomfort became maddening.

The water was cool. The water scalded.       felt its body being seared from the inside out, constantly disintegrating but somehow never losing mass, and staying submerged didn't help anymore. Maintaining a roughly solid shape took too much effort for it to sleep, and even then, it hurt to move and hurt to stay still. Soon, maybe        would fall apart despite that effort, and its slimy dust would cover the floor of the tank until the filter swept it away.

It noticed the arrival of Alphys and Sans only because they provided a slight distraction. Trying to communicate with them went nowhere.

( _Stupid dogs. Yeah, not all of them had the best sense, but Dogamy or Dogaressa should've had the sense to retreat and try to call in reinforcements, namely, Undyne. They were supposed to be smarter than that. They should've... she didn't even know what. How could she be mad, when she would've gone straight for the human, too?_ )

"alph. alphys. look at her."

"Yeah... I know."

Sans leaned close to the glass,  the shiny spots in his big, dark eyes reflecting back against his skull. His teeth gleamed, the corners of his mouth curled up in a crescent-shape. "is there something i'm missing here? 'cause that's a lot."

"It's not as much as it looks. I'll need to use more Determination soon, but she'll be okay a little longer."

Water gurgled in its ears as it tried to find a balance between listening and not-hurting. It tried until its ear fin melted shut, then gave up and settled for watching the monsters talk or argue or whatever they were doing. Sluggishly, the ear healed enough to work again. Bubblebubblebubble.

( _Without eyeballs, Papyrus could stare straight into the sun for as long as he liked, whereas Undyne was pretty much blind until her eye started to adjust and she didn't have to walk around with it covered like a dumbass. The Underground had all kinds of artificial lights, and she'd seen sunlight through the barrier when she visited Asgore's garden, but that was nothing compared to this. ...Heh heh, maybe that was why Frisk always made that face?_ )

The deterioration would progress until Alphys decided to do something. That was what she'd done in the past, and while she spoke too fast for the creature to follow even if it tried, there was no reason to expect anything different. Sleep, and a syringe, its contents red, glowing the color of a demon's eyes. Afterward it would wake up and still be in the water and there would be nothing but what its existence was already. No escape. Then a glowing syringe.

       felt sick.

 

 

Somebody knocked on the glass, The vibration traveled straight through to       's head, reducing its sight to a mess of starbursts and wobbly dark waves. The world cleared and Alphys was gone, but Sans remained, his fingertips resting on the glass. Either she'd left him behind or he came back without her.

He stood there as he had when he first appeared, when the little white monster by his shoulder. His mouth didn't move, it never did, so        couldn't tell if he was trying to speak to it or just watching it, the way Alphys did. It could have stuck its head out of the water to hear, but if he wasn't doing anything then it didn't care what he said. His hands moved, fluttered through gestures that were in some way like words, with meanings it still didn't understand. He smiled. He was free to do whatever he liked and go wherever he liked. That was why he always looked happy.

Sans dropped his hands, let them awkwardly hang. He'd done nothing, he always did nothing. A different monster knew him, once, but he was useless even back then. Why did its past self tolerate him for so long?

(That wasn't right. She was gone. She'd never been here at all. Both possibilities couldn't be true at the same time, could they?)

       , who wasn't anyone but maybe used to be someone, felt the edges of its own hands softening, wavering. Sans turned away, and the world twisted, wringing itself until the light dripped out. When         blinked and could see again, it was alone. Sans was wherever he Alphys and the flower went to after leaving this one. The creature never saw them during its short-lived attempt at escape. Wherever they went, it was far away from here.

It stared at the spot where the skeleton had been, long after he left.

( _Alphys licked at the blue dribbles of Nice Cream running down to her wrist. "...Also, don't say 'justice'."_

_"Why not??? That's the perfect answer!"_

_"It's too abstract! What I mean is, you know... what would YOU wish for, just, if it was for you, individually?"_

_Undyne flicked the leftover Unisicle stick between her fingers, then chomped down, splintering the thing in two._ _This was the kind of question you asked at a slumber party as a kid, right after the classic 'if you could have any kind of magic, what would it be?', but it didn't feel so dumb in the wishing room. Blue gemstones twinkled with an inner light. She left the half-stick in her mouth like a cigarette, minus the smoke and whatever gross stuff went into those things._

 _"Ehh, I dunno," Undyne lied. Pretty much everything she wished for in the future either qualified as 'too abstract', she suspected, or was the kind of thing she couldn't ever admit to Alphys. Not until the barrier broke, and there was no more reason to worry about the bad kind of 'what ifs'._ _"...Getting outta this dump?"_ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is lovingly dedicated to the dear people reading/commenting and also the professor of a poetry class I took in college who didn't like it when I used profanity, sentence fragments, or stream-of-consciousness narration.


	8. That Horrible View of the World

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rewriting a 53k-word fic is frustrating at times, but it does mean I get to revisit my favorite scene so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

ENTRY NUMBER 11:

* Putting Undyne's dust inside a flower isn't realistic, but I can build upon what I learned from the Amalgamates.  
* They only lost their individuality because I didn't know what I was doing.  
* I administered too much Determination, too quickly, and their bodies melted together...  
* Determination, which she naturally possessed.  
* If I utterly fail, nothing changes.  
* If, despite my new methods, Undyne turns out like the others, I can make it up to her with a happy life in the castle.  
* (my claws are shaking so bad, hahhhh...)

* * *

The Madjicks talked. Not just the one at the hospital, but all three of them.

Alphys couldn't feel upset. Normal monsters weren't compulsive liars, and they had sorcerer families and friends— _friends_ , plural, what a crazy concept!—they wanted to keep safe. But those friends told their friends, and their friends told their other friends, and now the monsters that came to visit Alphys, the ones with reports about rebuilding efforts or desperate requests for help on behalf of fallen loved ones, help they didn't know they didn't want, all of them had heard some variation on the story.

_They said you were there, too..._

_In the RUINS, is there really a...?_

_They said it was, like, some kind of MEGA evil magic thing hiding in there..._

_It sounded just like a kid, they kept saying..._

_A monster almost..._

_Was it really scary? What did you see?_

_...Chara...?_

 

 _Yes_ , she told them all.  _That place is dangerous for monsters. You have to stay away._

She wasn't completely lying. The vessel could leave the RUINS and go anywhere, but it never hurt anyone before or since. Undyne was the same as always. The Madjicks were unharmed, and the monster whose dust sat behind the door was a victim of the human—Alphys didn't see them die firsthand, but Sans said the vessel had no EXP. It did try to kill him and Alphys, but it held some inexplicable grudge against Sans, and it had even more of a reason to want Alphys dead. For everyone else, staying out of the RUINS would be enough to protect them, which was convenient since that was what they were going to do anyway.

...Or was she just trying to make up reassuring excuses to justify being a coward?

Alphys wished she could still stand to watch human anime. It was a good distraction, and in its absence, she was picking up Sans' bad habits. Maybe that was why she always felt so tired.

* * *

The doctor called, as promised.

Cabbage was alive. They were healing well, and Alphys did a lovely job in helping them, and everything was just lovely and wonderful and smelled like sweet lemonade. And their sibling was alive and doing just marvelous, aside from the minor detail of still being doomed. The good doctor Sucre didn't phrase that last part  _exactly_ that way, but Alphys knew.

The last thing Cabbage saw before they were injured was a little flower. Sucre could offer little information beyond that, and they didn't scream at Alphys for violating every rule in every scientific code of ethics in existence and making a mockery of all the years they spent in medical school, so she deduced that Cabbage had kept quiet about Undyne. Actually, it sounded like they'd kept pretty quiet in general, or else Sucre was keeping something from her for reasons that weren't stupid and terrible. Maybe Cabbage just bonked their head and had amnesia.

 

 

After the call, when Alphys was done with nodding and smiling and then feeling like a moron because  _she was on the phone so what even was the point_ , it occurred to her that the vessel had done her a huge favor. The elevator in the lab was still out of commission, and she sometimes woke up in tears after nightmares of falling down an endless pit... but the vessel did stop someone from telling the whole Underground about all the Determination she'd selfishly hoarded, or Undyne. Sans wouldn't have done that for her.

Now that enough time had passed to reassure her that the vessel was uninterested in Undyne, it was nice to imagine that it felt some sympathy toward her. It, too, was the victim of Alphys and her hubris. Maybe it wanted to offer a helping, um, leaf, or something. Maybe it really didn't hate Alphys...

It was a stupid idea. Coincidence alone had saved her scaly hide, and nothing else. But if a sapient flower could feel hatred, she didn't see why happiness or compassion were out of the question.

* * *

Alphys waved her hand in front of a laser's lens. The sensor didn't detect her movement, no beam of blue magic flashed out from the lens. Her stand stayed firmly attached to her wrist. 

"All of them are n-nonfunctional?" she asked.

It had been no less than a week since she was  _supposed_ to meet with someone at the Core about the puzzle issues, but then Cabbage showed up on her doorstep and she kept putting it off. If the mole monster at her side could've reached any higher than her knees, they would've strangled her already, she was positive. 

"All of the puzzles that weren't out at the time. The ones we were refurbishing are all safe... only the ones in use at the time were ruined."

"It makes sense," Alphys mumbled, polishing her glasses with her sleeve. The ozone and ambient magic permeating the Core always made her glasses fog up. "If all they wanted was to easily move through here, anything more would be a waste of time."

The mole monster chattered their pointy teeth and bounced from one foot to the other. "There's the... other part, too! Nobody wanted to touch it, and it seemed like a good idea to let you see it first..."

"Okay, I'd like to look. At... wh-whatever it is..."

Like a furry tennis ball, the mole monster jumped their way to a mousehole (mole... hole?) in the wall, switched on their headlamp, and dove in. Tiny rodent claws skittered beneath the floor, and a whole panel swung open, nearly smashing into Alphys' shin.

The worker squeaked apologetically and tried to tip the panel the other way, but she just walked around for a better look to save them the trouble. Their headlamp was facing the wrong way to be of any help, so she knelt at the mouth of the gap in the floor to get a better view.

At first, she couldn't tell what she was looking at. Beneath the floor ran bundles of cables the size of her waist, supplying power from the Core itself to this specific module and the traps inside. Or, they should have done that. The rubber insulation was all stripped away; the copper cables underneath were frayed and snapped in some places, sliced cleanly in others. And all of it was tangled together with what at first she assumed to be more wires with green insulation. But normal electrical cables didn't have leaves or thorns...

"They go REAL far down," the mole helpfully added. "Explains why none of the rooms would shuffle. Clearing them out will take some time."

Alphys leaned as far into the gap as she dared, keeping a finger on the bridge of her glasses to keep them on her snout. The vines weren't all green after all, but brown and shriveled like old leather in some places. They had to have been there a long time—since the summer, easily.

 _The summer._ Alphys coughed into her sleeve, the ozone in the air making her throat tight.

There was no time to analyze the situation as she ran around on _that_ day, trying to shepherd all the scared monsters and crying kids safety. No time to hypothesize  _why_  and  _how_  everything went so wrong; there just seemed to be some unseen magic ensuring that the human could do whatever they wanted, totally unimpeded. All the puzzles were solved for them, and the path to the castle was made as straight as could be. When they entered the elevator, it didn't drop them to their death. When they faced monsters, the monsters died.

"I... s-see," she said faintly.

* * *

While the tape rewound, Alphys picked at a peeling patch of scales on the inside of her elbow.

Shedding was a hassle, leaving her itchy and scruffy-looking, but she'd cleaned out the filter of Undyne's tank hours earlier and her fingers were still the color of dirty concrete. Soap didn't help, scrubbing didn't help, disinfectant didn't help. Her new scales would be the right color, though. They already were, underneath the old, dead layer.

The VHS player clicked. As Alphys reached for the PLAY button, Sans appeared in the doorway. Or else he'd been there and she only just noticed.

"i know it's disappointing to hear, but skeletons are born, not made," Sans said. "...not like THAT, anways."

With a guilty  _eep!_ , Alphys fumbled to unroll the sleeve of her pajama shirt and drew her legs up to her chest. Printed pink cat faces (not like Mew Mew but sort of close) smiled crookedly up at her, their features distorted by the fabric stretching around her knees.

Sans stepped carefully over the little TV's power cord and considered the TV screen, the stacks of numbered tapes. Alphys had watched two already and neither of them were useful, because tape number one had captured a personal moment between the former king and queen, and tape number two was a recording of the second  _Love Witches_ OVA, which made her want to burst into flames and die on the spot (especially in the context of the first video) until she remembered that she'd made that the tape was her own, hidden in the old lab tape ages ago, and all the planets slid back into alignment. The others, though...

Alphys paused the tape and then went back to scratching her arm through the fleecy fabric, but her claws were chewed to stubs and no help. Somebody like Asgore or Mettaton seeing her dressed like this would've sent her crawling under a rock and never emerging. Thankfully, Sans didn't care, so she didn't care. It was nice to hang out with somebody even sloppier than herself.

Static danced across the screen. It was the only visual indication that the TV was still on. "watching a movie about a black cat in a cave at night? nice."

Alphys rolled her eyes. "They're the videos from down in the lab. Ahh... remember, earlier, when I said there was something important I needed to go get?"

"right."

"I want to be able to hear both of their voices again," she said, then cringed. "...Ahh, th-that... makes me sound like a freak... I mean, I'm trying to... it's j-just so I can be sure, I kn-KNOW it's a really stupid idea b-but just, you know, so I can be t-totally COMPLETELY sure about... something."

She bit her lip, turned back to the TV, and restarted the video. She pressed the volume button a bunch of times but it was already as high as it would go, and voice emerged through the static; a syllable here, the up-and-down of a sentence. Another voice answered, small and quavering and also so loud in comparison to the first voice that Alphys jumped even though she knew it was coming.

" _I... I don't like this idea, Chara._ "

There was the ghost of a kid's laugh, a muted voice. Alphys turned down the volume. Sans, for some reason, laughed too. Sort of. More like a  _pfff_. He didn't have real vocal cords, anyway, she didn't know how that worked.

"The flower talked to you before, right? Do you remember what it sounded like?"

" _Wh...what?_ "

Sans did not ask what was wrong with her, or anything like that, but she knew him well enough to recognize a confused silence when she heard one. Or, rather, when she... _didn't_ hear one? However you wanted to phrase it. She still wasn't sure why he'd laughed, but he seemed a little uncomfortable now. "...yeah. it didn't sound like either of 'em."

" _N-no, I'm not... big kids don't cry._ "

"Th-that's, that's what I thought, I just... maybe... ...f-forget it," Alphys mumbled.

She didn't give it much thought, before, but the bed behind her once belonged to Chara. The quilt looked new, so she guessed Asgore did some rearranging since the room was last used, but it was still the place where they'd... well.

Alphys turned off the TV.

"you, uh, said today that undyne's gonna need more determination soon," Sans said.

"Y-yeah."

"maybe that's true. i dunno how it works. but i've been doing some thinking. and... i'm not feeling so good about any of this."

"Oh." Before Alphys realized what she was doing, she started to reach for the vial hidden beneath the collar of her shirt, stopping only just in time. Sans made no comment. "...Okay. I c-can't make you... if you don't want to help anymore, just promise you won't tell anyone else, and I'll... figure something out. ...I can't just leave that elevator broken forever, a-anyway, so..."

"it's not that," Sans said. "alphys, she's going nuts in there. you've gotta know that already."

Alphys was still facing the TV so there was no way he could see her reaction, but he must have guessed what she was thinking anyway (it was obvious) and added: "everyone was thrilled to have their family members back. undyne... alright, she's no mettaton, and i dunno what her family situation is like—"

"She talked about them, ahh, pretty much never."

"...ok. but people respect her. they're not gonna be mad she's alive, if that's what you're scared of. if you explain that you used the determination before you knew anybody else might need it, they'd understand."

Alphys looked at her clawed feet. At some point her hand had snaked into her opposite sleeve and resumed picking at the worn scales under her elbow. "If it was just once, m-maybe. But I've been lying to them. Even after they forgave me for what I did."

"so this is exactly like last time."

Scratch. Pick. Scrape.

"Last time... a human was here in the Underground. And I just... by chance... h-HAPPENED to be the person with a place where they could hide. If no one was killed, so they weren't afraid to stop and, and think about what I did... and if Asgore was alive, so they didn't have a reason to want me to, to be a nice person who deserves being listened to, m-much less... this... ...w-what would they have done? And what would they have done, if all of that was true, and... a-and also... everything I did was actually f-for nothing, because in the end, their mom or their child or b-b-best fr-friend died horribly?"

She felt a sick gratification in how long it took Sans to answer.

"fine. i don't know what would've happened. but that doesn't change anything from undyne's viewpoint."

"How do you know what she thinks?" Alphys asked. Her hand went still, and then she dug her claws into the crook of her elbow. "And since when do you c-care this much about Undyne? You weren't there when she..."

Alphys didn't even know where he was for much of that day; she'd originally thought he died alongside his brother, before Undyne, before the evacuation even started and forced her to reveal her horrible secret. By the time he turned up, alive, she was almost beyond feeling anything, and before that... well, you couldn't be mad at a dead person for being too lazy to help anyone, that was ridiculous.

But this was still a really,  _really_ stupid time to let herself get mad about anything, because he was  _right_ , even if he was pointing out things she'd thought about long ago. Because she remembered those things but she also remembered what it was like to nearly fall to her death, and she still had no idea where the vessel was or what it was doing, and she was a creepy weirdo who'd left this room mostly unused because she was sleeping in the lab practically every night. Sans didn't need any more reason to stop helping her.

Scrape. Pick. Scratch. The scales on her arm felt wet.

"...Maybe, earlier, I could have made different decisions. But it's too late to go down a different path. It j-just... is."

"if i didn't give a crap, i wouldn't be here."

" _I'll go get the flowers_ ," the voice on the tape quavered.

"...W-well. I care, too," Alphys said. "...I didn't want any of this to happen. M-my plan was stupid, but it wasn't THIS. She was s-supposed to... ...I d-don't know anymore."

Alphys waited for Sans to ask her just what her plan was, or ask if she still had one, or tell her she was an idiot. He didn't, which was something she knew she should be thankful for. She waited and he didn't say anything.

She pressed EJECT on the TV, grabbed the tape, and returned it to the stack.

* * *

Nothing changed. 

Alphys was still the only one who could do something about the flower. It was a danger to monsters in general and a particular danger to Sans, no matter how blasé he was about the issue. Accidents could happen, and it was her responsibility to make sure they wouldn't.

Just as it would be her fault  _when_  her efforts inevitably led to some kind of horrible catastrophe. Maybe her creation would finally kill her, and Sans would slink away and hide somewhere while all the other monsters collectively freaked out. And Undyne would... no, she didn't want to think about that. She had to do things right, for once. She couldn't afford to do otherwise.

The flower helped the human. She didn't know why, but  _why_  didn't matter. The flower was dangerous, it had hurt someone, and tried to hurt her and Sans, and she had to stop it from going any further.

But, she still wondered.

* * *

* * *

 So, Sans sold his SOUL.

Except not really, because he didn't exchange it for a two-pack of ketchup or a really sweet pair of socks or anything appealing like that. He just tossed it away, every time Alphys asked him to transport her down to the lab and he said "ok" instead of "hey, maybe we shouldn't keep a dying person in your basement, i'm gonna go do a crossword puzzle instead".

He'd made attempts at getting through to Alphys, kind of, but wasn't sure if that really made up for acting as an accessory to unintentional torture. It seemed like the kind of thing where if you had to ask, the answer was  _no,_ but the only realistic alternative—realistic in the sense that he could imagine himself doing it—was to jump ship and let Alphys deal with the elevator situation herself, which was a tempting offer but somehow even less ethical than the status quo. Among other issues, their little flower buddy already tried once to squish them both like that poor bug kid, and while it was polite (or maybe just scared) enough to keep its distance so far, Sans couldn't predict what it would do to Alphys if she went alone. Or, okay, he could  _predict_ , but not necessarily correctly, since it had officially been established that he was a crappy judge of the flower's character.

...Hoo, boy. Was this how she felt, just,  _all the time_ during the debacle with Snowy's mom and company? It didn't put his conscience at ease, but it explained a lot.

 

In the interest of not starting a fight he knew he'd lose, Sans made himself as unobtrusive as he could. It was easy during the day, since there were other monsters who wanted to talk to Alphys, and while he wasn't sure if she'd given up on that plan for the RUINS yet or not, she  _was_ around more often, which meant he didn't have to make up excuses for her.

When they were in the lab, he stayed out of the way and just tried not to gawk.

Alphys' fixation on the tank's filter seemed strange to him at first, before Undyne started turning to dust and he started wishing that Alphys could do more. The glass fogged up like the inside of a smoky room, and Alphys was so religious about upkeep that he could only assume this was as good as the water situation could possibly get. Not a really comforting thought. When he'd first laid eyesockets on the Amalgamates... you could get used to a sight like that, _they_ could get used to it, they were just weird goopy monsters when you got right down to it. This room felt like a crypt, and not because it had a skeleton inside it.

Sans leaned back into the counter, resting his elbows on the edge. Tried not to stare. Tap water spattered into the basin.

Undyne usually stuck her head out of the water when they came around, which made Alphys painfully self-conscious, but she was been zoned-out and quiet all day, curled up like an egg. Not like a fish egg—maybe like a fish egg? He didn't know what they looked like—but pale and roughly oval in shape, chin tucked down toward her chest and her long tail wrapped all around her body as if to keep the dust from drifting off her skin like steam. It wasn't working.

As if she could sense that she was being watched, she raised her head, and the narrow pupil of her good eye shone through the murk. She looked blank, masklike, but unhappiness radiated no less visibly than the dust.

Sans pulled his arms back to his sides and offered a tentative little wave.

What could it be like in there? It felt like he should be able to relate, a little, but the loneliness before his brother came along was nothing in comparison, more  _weird childhood_ than  _legit trauma_. He was too little to know anything different, he was a blank slate. The thing in the tank... wasn't.

The faucet squeaked. Water swirled down the drain with a hollow gurgle; Alphys mumbled something to herself. Undyne floated and watched him in dead silence.

His effort at signed communication went nowhere the other day, but he gave it another try, just for kicks:  _HEY._

Slowly, deliberately, Undyne unwrapped herself just enough to slip her arms out from where she'd pinned them to her midsection. That seemed semi-promising—could've just been a coincidence, but it wasn't like she went to sleep or told him to go bone himself, so there was that.

_HOW DO YOU FEEL?_

He waited, then repeated himself, dragging out each sign. The straight line of her mouth, broken up only by the points of her protruding fangs, tilted down. She shot a sideways glance at Alphys, whose back was still turned to her.

Sans' grin twisted. Now he really did feel the way Alphys always did.

_OK. THAT QUESTION WAS STUPID._

"So, tomorrow morning, I'll need to..." Alphys trailed off once she realized his attention was elsewhere. "uh, Sans? What are you doing?"

He shrugged, slouched back. "y'know, even if she never learned how to sign... seems like now would be a good time. might come in handy."

"I g-guess," Alphys said, turning back to the sink. She spoke more to it than to Sans. "It isn't a bad idea. But that's not... r-really the central problem. When it comes to... n-not being able to communicate with her."

He began to make some noncommittal remark in reply, but after Alphys looked away from the tank, Undyne did... something, moving her hands, or arms, or however overly specific you wanted to be. Sans didn't catch much except for the motion itself, but when he looked to her, she repeated it; one hand held vertically, the other near her face, then both coming together. Dust puffed out from between them.

What  _was_  that? Was it anything? Plenty of monsters were of the not-finger-having persuasion, but they usually had, you know, faces. And context for what they had to say. He almost thought she was shooting for  _MARRY_ , but felt safe in ruling that one out.

"...wait," Sans said. "she doesn't actually know it, does she?"

"I d-don't think so."

Huh. Sans scrunched his eye sockets. Undyne stared intently back at him, repeated her first gesture, then followed it up with something else. Her signing was... rough, and her grammar was pretty nonexistent, and then Alphys turned back to work on the filter and Undyne curled back into a ball, eye hidden, face behind her arm.

"...Why do you ask?"

"just, uh... wanted to check," Sans said.

 

Only after they left did the words sink in; taking that long was kind of an embarrassment, given his position, but it had been a long time and he had reason to think he was letting his own hangups color what he thought he saw. But, there it was, and he was pretty sure he had it right:

_PHOTO OF FRIENDS._

* * *

Once Alphys shut herself in her room for the night, Sans slipped off to his workshop.

Which, actually, was a boneheaded decision, because if he'd gone to take a new reading immediately after that last trip to the lab, it would be complete before morning. It was his own fault, he always put this stuff off until the last second and it always came back to bite him and somehow surprised him each time, but still, ugh.

And so, instead of doing the most useful thing he  _could_ be doing, Sans procrastinated and napped and picked at this little mystery the way Alphys picked at her scales.

Option A: Undyne was going off the deep end from isolation and came up with some wild non-sequitur that he misinterpreted because of his own baggage. Plausible.

Option B: Undyne had some kind of power over time, similar to that of the flower or human. He didn't even know how to prove that it  _wasn't_ true; he also didn't know why she hadn't already jumped back to before the human killed her, or before she ended up in that tank. She was in bad shape, not stupid.

Option C, which was actually kind of just an extension of option B: Undyne had interacted with somebody who  _did_ have a special power—either the flower or some unknown party related to the weird readings over the past weeks. Or else she had one seriously crappy version of the flower's ability. Alphys wasn't building a machine of her own, but it was certainly  _interesting_ that they only popped up after Undyne's un-death. And the day all those monsters seemed to be acting all sleepy and confused... he wasn't sure how that fit in, but it might.

Option D: All or none of the above. He was missing something. And as much as it pained him to admit, this was the most likely scenario by a not-inconsequential margin.

 

Sans flicked through his old notes, trying to focus on the dates but too preoccupied to focus as much as he knew he needed to.

The flower, the human, maybe-a-third-being, maybe-Undyne. The flower was trouble for sure, and it didn't like him or Alphys, its creator. Determination... suffice to say, the human had plenty of  _that_.

Who else had Determination?

Amalgamates. Monsters who treated the laws of physics like they were just suggestions at best. Magic was an expression of a monster's personality, and he'd assumed their weird magic was the product of their scrambled-together psyches... nothing in their behavior hinted at time travel, or any kind of special knowledge, but it was also a little unrealistic to expect a bunch of dogs that were glued together to be like _hey, I just gazed into the depths of time and space, let me tell you all about it_.

Then there was Undyne. Determination, yep. The ability to do anything useful with it? Seemed like a no, and she was up to her gills in the stuff. But if she had less than the human or the flower, or even the other Amalgamates... actively reaching in and interfering with a situation versus passively observing it, those were two opposite ends of the same continuum, the act of observing was itself a form of interference, it worked that way in quantum mechanics and with the machine he'd inherited, and if you wanted to get all psychological...

Okay, Sans actually didn't. The point he was circling back around to in his head was that if possessing a lot of Determination really did make it possible to alter time and space, then the idea that Determination could let you do  _something_ weird was maybe not total bullshit. Unless he really was just projecting, imagining that what he saw wasn't nonsense.

Dammit. This could be big, but he didn't allow himself enough time to test it before Alphys went for that next injection. He had a feeling he wouldn't be so interested in getting further involved in this mess, after that.

Sans set the notebook aside and finally went for the binder.

The photo tucked into its back flap was old; it wasn't dated, but it had been folded and unfolded until a ridge developed through its center like a spine, and the colors were faded, bleached out. A human company name ran across the plasticy back of the photo, and the Sans who originally owned the picture might have recognized it, but he didn't. Just as he also didn't know why this other-Sans had entrusted it to him. There was a lot he didn't know, and he doubted he'd ever learn most of it. Kind of a downer, but true.

Sans stepped out the workshop door and through a shortcut, and then he entered the true lab.

 

Alphys had turned down the lights before they left for the evening, leaving the room bathed in shadow. For one freaky moment, as his eyes brightened to adjust, he could only see the thin layer of dust spread out over the water. In its center floated a shapeless clump of even more dust, like somebody just poured it in there and left. But it moved every now and then, just a little, and not in the direction of the filter pulling all the other excess dust from the tank.

"heya," Sans called out, softly.

The dust-clump flattened out like dough and pulled back into itself, gaining structure and dimension. A head, arms, a torso, a long mermaid tail. A dimly gleaming eye in the dark, and a mouthful of fangs, and gurgling breathing in a half-melted chest.

"sorry to intrude, but it's this or making things super awkward with alphys, so..."

The monster in the tank listened dully.

"S...ans." 

A chill ran through him, like snowy slush was pouring into where his marrow should be. The aggressively miserable feeling percolating in this room was just a constant he'd had to learn to block out, but now it was gone. He couldn't tell what emotion, if any, had replaced it.

"yeah, i'm here." Sans walked closer to the glass, until he had to look up to try and see the monster behind it. "you said something interesting earlier today. or, uh, signed it. whatever."

A gurgled inhale. Exhale.

One arm started to melt. She seemed pretty disinterested in that, but moved as if flexing imaginary fingers, and it mostly stopped.

From this new angle, there was a translucent quality to her whole body that wasn't there earlier in the day. The pinpoint lights in his eyes passed through her and twinkled, faintly, in the metal grating above her shoulder. Sans gripped the photo in his pocket like a talisman. Or a security blanket.

"...undyne? you good?"

It was a stupid question, the kind you only asked when you already could guess the answer, but what else could he say? _Oh_ _crap?_  'Cause he felt like she might take offense to that, if she was listening. Which was a big if, because she was just lying there, on the water, as if on a bed. Sans waited for some spark of recognition, like last time, but nothing happened.

He took a step back. Alphys was the one who kept saying her friend's condition wasn't as bad as it looked, she'd looked at her a couple hours earlier and said the next injection could be put off 'til the next day. Sans didn't know how Undyne...  _worked_ , but she didn't look now the way she'd looked then.

"is something the matter?"

It was the first question with different wording, an excuse to fill a nervous silence, but Undyne seemed to ponder it before coming up with an answer. "Hu...rts."

Welp. Ok. He would've been more surprised to hear it  _didn't_ , honestly.

He was also reminded, though it had been no less than a year ago since this happened, of the time she tossed Papyrus in a pond for trying to fuss over her when she had a cold. To wit: oh... crap.

"ok," he said. "good to know that. uh. alphys is the one who's equipped to deal with this stuff. i'll go grab her."

Sans was ready to vamoose despite  _and_ because of what Undyne said, but she shook her head, the water lapping around the side of her face, and choked out: "D- _Don't._ " 

"it'll take three seconds, don't worry."

"D...don't..." she whispered raggedly, as if she was scared he'd do exactly what he said he would before she could get another syllable out. Her shoulders trembled like she was cold, and she curled up tighter, which made her sink a little and tilted her face out of view. "Do...n't... l...ea...ve. ...pl... ea... se...."

Sans froze.

Yeah okay it was time to go get Alphys. Five minutes ago, it was time to go get her. Jump ship, make this somebody else's problem.

But he just couldn't. He was lazy and he never did anything much to help anyone, but he wasn't naturally cruel, under all the grease and apathy. Not by nature. And it _would_ be cruel to just walk away, as another monster begged you not to leave them alone in the dark.

Jeez. Oh jeez.

"just... so we're clear," Sans said, slowly. "alphys can help if you're hurting. i can't."

"St.... a.... y."

What was going to happen if and when Alphys realized what was possibly going to happen here? Well, they'd burn that bridge when they got to it, because that was the least of everyone's problems at this point. "alright. j-just, uh, is there... anything else you want me to do? i mean, within the confines of, y'know. not even being a not-that-kind-of-doctor doctor, heh heh."

"..." She raised her arm and motioned, clumsily, to the corner of the tank near where the ladder stood. Then everything below where her elbow should've been fell apart under its own weight, and it looked like she couldn't move what was left of it anymore. "H...ere..?"

Okay, sure. That was simple enough. Sans obediently went to the ladder and climbed up, ignoring the friendly little warning label saying not to go any higher than the top step as he crawled out on top of the tank. The grating covering it up was pretty thin, but it didn't so much as bend beneath his minimal weight. Which, since he couldn't swim and didn't feel like jumping into a dust-snowglobe to learn, was reassuring.

Crap. Jeez. What was he doing here? Alphys would be better for this, too.

Sans wasn't sure if Undyne could even see him or not, but he made some noise as he settled in place, and drifted nearer to his side. The water was clear where she'd just been, for a second, until more dust drifted in to fill the gap. "hey."

Undyne gripped her skull, or whatever was in there, then settled back down a little. With the arm that was slightly less wrecked than the other one, she slowly, deliberately reached up, bumping the inside of the grate by his knee. Without words, Sans could tell what she was asking for, and he slipped his hand through a gap in the metal slats to take her hand.

Even without skin with physical nerves, her touch was feverishly hot, squishing white goo around his metacarpals and phalanges like he'd dipped them into a vat of melted wax. It didn't hurt, and he wouldn't have complained if it did, but the distance between him and Undyne meant he had to lean down until his chest almost touched his folded legs, which was as comfortable as it sounded. His arms were too short for this.

"i did try talking to her, just for the record." Sans moved everything but his hand, trying to make an awkward sitting position a little less so. "but... alphys is her own kind of determined too, i guess."

A gurgled breath in. Out.

"she wanted to help," Sans said. "even if it doesn't feel that way."

"..."

"she loves you. a lot."

"..."

"and i care, too."

Undyne didn't even seem to hear. Sans noted, with a mix of morbid fascination and horror, that he could see parts of his hand through hers. Like an X-ray.

"...Don't... wa...nt. Th... thi...s..."

At first he took that to mean she'd changed her mind and wanted him to leave after all, but she still held onto his hand and showed no intention of letting it go. Then the hopelessness behind her words sank in, and the icy slush in his bones turned to ice. The lights in his eyes involuntarily contracted.

"hey. c'mon. don't say a thing like that."

The image of the human's face as they stood in that hallway reappeared in his mind, uninvited. Given the option, getting jumped by a knife-wielding zombie lunatic would be preferable to this. 'Least _somebody_ would be having a fun time.

"H...urt. N... eedl...es... hurt. Won't... st...stop. Want to... stop."

Like an idiot, Sans came close to saying something like,  _hey, that doesn't sound like you_ , but if ever there was a time for somebody to sound uncharacteristically despairing then hello, here it was. He didn't want to be here for that either, and neither did Alphys. Nobody wanted what was happening here.

And he wouldn't have so much as entertained the idea, he would've kicked it out and locked the door behind it, but Undyne outright said it now and he couldn't pretend not to have heard. Alphys had no plan, a non-plan. She'd inject the rest of the Determination into whoever was left in this tank, and once it ran out, this nightmare would end the only way it  _could_ end. There was no version of events that resulted in a happy Alphys or Undyne or Sans. So what could it hurt, if he just... left the tank open, or hid the Determination, and let whatever happened, happen? Alphys would never forgive him if she knew, but her hands weren't any cleaner. She'd created this situation, and her good intentions didn't make her any less culpable than the human.

Except, what he was considering, that was murder. He could dress it up in whatever nice, soft-sounding terms he wanted, he could get mad at Alphys for actually _trying_ to fix a shitty situation, or he could frame this to himself as letting Undyne just jump ahead to being the happily oblivious person in the photo, but he was thinking about  _killing_ someone. Someone who, for all he knew, didn't even realize the implications of what she was saying. He wasn't the best person in the world, not by a long shot, but he didn't want to be a person who'd killed somebody else.

His teeth ground together. "undyne, listen. it's... hard to explain, but... you're not gonna be here forever. i don't know when it'll happen, but sooner or later, you won't remember this. i won't either. nobody will." And it was true, regardless of the photo's existence, wasn't it? Eventually this would end. The only way it could. Eventually. "...i promise."

Undyne—what was left of her—shifted her arm, still hiding her face from view, and burbled. It didn't even sound like an attempt at words.

"...but maybe you already know that, though?" Sans said.

"Hn..?"

"remember today? 'picture of our friends'... you signed that. you've seen something like it before, maybe..?"

The photo. That was the whole reason he was down here, wasn't it? He still had it in his pocket.

Another confused noise, close to a whimper. Sans wasn't sure of how he should interpret that, and there was a strong possibility that the picture would just upset her, if she could even see it in the dark, but it was the only distraction he had to offer. He wiggled his hand around to try and free it from her gooey clutches, but she made a strangled sound and held on so desperately that he felt like a complete asshole for making her think he was doing what he said he wouldn't.

"sorry. i'm not going anywhere. just chill, ok?" Sans murmured. "...i'm here. s'ok. you're ok."

There was no way to tell how much of that she even understood, but she pulled his hand to her chest and wrapped herself around it, both hands clinging tight and her cheek resting in the curve of his wrist. He'd be lying if he said it didn't feel weird to have someone like Undyne act so clingy and needy, but whatever. As long as she didn't ask _that_ of him anymore, he could deal.

Already forced to sit at a weird angle so he could reach far enough into the tank, Sans twisted around even more so he could get his free hand into his pocket on the opposite side. Found some lint, random bits of paper, a stray sprinkle or two... there it was.

His fingers closed around the photo. 

A set of fangs closed around his wrist.

He heard a sound like an old tree branch snapping, and for a really, really enjoyable couple of seconds that he'd soon miss, Sans was too off-guard to feel anything.

Then a wave of agony swept up through his arm and into his shoulder in the same instant that he was wrenched down into the water. _Almost_ into the water—the grate was in the way and kept him where he was, but his uninjured arm was pinned under his chest and he couldn't pull it free in time to stop his skull from slamming into the top edge of the tank where glass gave way to metal. Air hissed between his teeth in a silent scream, cut short.

A second crack he heard inside his skull and the room turned a funny not-color. The sensory overload from his arm and his head would've been debilitating even if that sensation wasn't mindbending pain. Sans struggled and flailed mostly at random and only when he felt his hoodie being pulled off him did he realize that the jaws were clamped down on his sleeve and nothing else; he squirmed and rolled out and managed to disentangle himself, but also tumbled over the side of the tank in the process.

He landed in a heap like a dropped puppet, the impact spiking through his damaged skull and making him retch, but the pain in his arm was fading and he managed somehow to get himself to the other side of the room before crumpling back down. Everything shook like he was inside a falling elevator car.

Water spilled noisily onto the floor, and there was a loud thudding, and there was light, blue, loud, electric. It outlined the arm lying in front of him, flashing on and off, and Sans stared uncomprehendingly at the splintered stump where his left hand used to be, marrow and shiny drips of blood. In his other hand he gripped something he couldn't remember what it was. He saw sparkles on the floor and no more light. The darkness pulsated.

Hurt. It hurt. Skull. His...

Sans rattled convulsively and slid in and out of consciousness; he wasn't getting it back once he lost it, and he fought to hold on, to stay awake. He didn't have the strength to fight. He already lost. He didn't do anything. Why..?

Sensing what was coming, some primal, obscure part of his SOUL—self—mind latched desperately onto an image of the one thing one person that could still save him. _Alphys. Alphys. Help._

...Not here. She wasn't here, not-here was as good to him as her being on the moon, and he was alone in the dark with a thing he couldn't see only hear the sounds. The thoughts strung together like beads, or not thoughts so much as images; Alphys, a phone, something... something. He didn't want to...

Sans shoved his hand, the one he had left _no,_ _right hahhhh_ , in the general direction of his hoodie pocket, which wasn't there and he didn't know why it wasn't but he thought something like  _far down too far down she can't_ and his arm hurt and he couldn't lift his skull anymore. Alphys wasn't here. She couldn't...

The dark closed in around him.

Time moved slower. Out of the empty blank nothing stepped a monster, tall, at the midpoint between gawky and elegant; his hands were folded behind his back and his long arms formed perfect triangles on each side of a slim torso. His face, an oval of cracked white porcelain, wore an expression of smooth serenity. His robe were black, like a monk's, and there was no separation between it and the darkness.

Sans wanted to ask where he had been, or where Papyrus was, but his arms wouldn't move. The figure watched him as if he had signed something, though, the lights in his eyes bright and attentive; the hands unclasped, and he swept down to his charge's side, kneeling. A hand went out, like a white bird, and descended, the long fingers tenderly stroking Sans' skull.

They made a sound like gnawing teeth on splintered bone.


	9. An Ending

 ENTRY NUMBER 16:

* I ran upstairs for a sec to check my phone  
* He left a message about a bunny monster wanting my help with their friend..?  
* UM GUYS I'M KINDA BUSY RN LOLLLLL

* * *

       could not see by the time it clambered out of the tank's wreckage. It didn't know if its magic attack clipped a ceiling light by mistake or if its eye just melted from its head already, it didn't stop to check.

It didn't need to. Sans rattled and rattled like he _wanted_ to be found, and the air tasted sweet, rusty. The rattling slowed, turned sporadic, and stopped, but the scent of blood lingered. He was still there.

        bumped into a fuzzy object, palmed it until the word  _slipper_ came to mind, then swatted it aside. It landed somewhere with a wet slap.

Hurting a monster that had not attacked        first was wrong, in some abstract sense. Words like  _justice_ or  _fairness_ were also abstractions. But until his skull broke, Sans had been free of pain and free to do whatever he wanted, and go wherever he wanted, while        stayed at the mercy of a confusing monster, trapped and alone. Hurting  _her_ was almost literally unthinkable, Sans had what        wanted, and        had nothing left but garbled memories. There was no reason for it not to do what it had just done, even if it couldn't take what he had. It would still get one part of what _it_ wanted; too much broken glass carpeted the floor for Alphys to ever fix it all, and however it finally disappeared from this terrible room,        would never be a thing in a tank again.

        laughed and laughed and ran out of air and still couldn't stop laughing until it collapsed onto the irregular, brittle lump that was Sans. He'd stopped moving, but the impact made him spasm at just the wrong time, driving the broken end of his arm through        's gut and out of its back. Which didn't feel  _good_ , but made less of an impression than the time Frisk it.

 _"Out. Wa...nt... to... lea...ve..."_  

 _"take that up with alphys," Sans said. He spoke more slowly than she did, which made it easier to follow what he said, but the pity in his voice made        so violently angry that it would've preferred hearing nothing_ _._ _"she's the one that's so adamant about you staying in there..."_

_Some of the words were the same but in a different order. He was still too far away for        to reach him. Moving too soon would just ensure he stayed that way, which meant forcing time back and then saying whatever would make him come back later on, and then waiting longer. If it tried to attack while Alphys was nearby, she would get in the way, and it would hurt her by accident.        had to keep waiting._

_"H...elp?"_

_He sighed. "even if it was up to me, i don't want responsibility for whatever'd happen. and it isn't. sorry."_

_"D...on't... c...ar...e."_

_"don't say something like that," said Sans. He looked up to the ceiling as if it was suddenly very interesting, though        had spent enough time doing the same thing to know that it wasn't, now or ever. It almost took the opportunity he'd presented and tried to throw a magic attack at him, but he stopped looking at the ceiling too quickly for       to act._

_"hey, what about that stuff you were trying to say, before? the surface... well, i think that's what you were shooting for. sure weirded alphys out, by the way."_

Dust and liquification were just constants by now, but        felt itself collapsing somewhere deep inside—not just its stomach, though that wasn't helping.        had left the tank once, when it first tried to escape, but that was just after an injection, when the burning feeling inside made it a little stronger. Before that... there  _was_ a time before that, when it was still halfway a different monster. Waking up on white sheets. Then water, later.

This couldn't last long. Had to... hurry.        fumbled blindly until it found Sans' skull, it bit down and its teeth skidded across the smooth bone, crunching through the vertebrae between the base of the skull and the collar of his shirt. They broke as easily as his wrist, and so did something that wasn't bone, and Sans burst into dust.

Gravity tilted sideways. Whatever time       had left was now used up, and its mouth tasted a little like the blackened stuff from a stovetop and a little like it just tried licking an electrical socket, it tried to cough but its teeth were plastered together and then it didn't have a head, or teeth, or anything, because all the vibrating tiny bits of its body were splitting off in random directions, spilling       unceremoniously onto the heap of dust and clothing where Sans had been.

  _"if and when you go back, i'll forget we talked. you got that?"_

 _nodded. What it thought Sans was referencing was one of the very few things it already knew for certain._ _If it wasn't able to do what he described, he wouldn't be trusting enough to climb the ladder and sit near it, time after time: first he and Alphys came to do what they usually did, then        said the right words, and they were both confused but Sans returned later, alone. It was good at keeping track of patterns like this. Alphys had made sure of that, whether she knew it or not..._

_"good. 'cause i made a code word for this kind of scenario, in case it comes up. y'know, as one does. heh." Sans chuckled for some reason."so if you say it, i'll know right away that SOMETHING'S going on, just not the specifics. then you can fill me in on the rest. still on the same page?"_

_"C...ode... ...wor...d..."_

_"bingo. so, the codeword is..."_

_Sans stopped._

_waited._ _Each attempt at luring him near progressed a little further than the last, but it had not drawn him this close before; when several seconds had passed,        exerted the energy to look up and make sure he was still there. He was._

_"actually, uh. not gonna lie, THIS situation wasn't on my radar when i came up with these. hmm. lemme think... what would be easier..."_

Being a puddle of sticky goo made it harder to move, or talk, or do anything at all, but it wasn't really unpleasant. Sight and balance were both gone,       's perception was already limited to touch and distorted sound. The floor was covered in water, bits of glass, and dust, all over        and all over Sans' clothing, soggy in some spots and dry where it piled high enough to stay out of the water. Those dry spots were small and few, growing fewer as the dust seeped into      .

Sans was dead. He deserved to be dead. He did nothing and he had what        wanted, he was free and he did nothing he did nothing nothing  _nothing_

_If his hunch was wrong, he'd just confuse Undyne, and if he was right, he might be delivering an emotional kick in the teeth, but bailing out would be cruel too, and sitting around babbling like a numbskull would be torture for them both... basically, there existed no options that didn't suck, so going with the option that could provide a useful hint was, uh. Still not good. Ethically defensible? Yeah, sure, that sounded legit._

_Sans turned away, not that Undyne was watching him super closely, and unfolded the photo like a hand of cards._

_He'd spent so long picking apart each detail that he could've redrawn the thing in his sleep, if he could actually draw—the other Sans, whose expression he could never read; Papyrus, beaming like it_ _was everybody's birthday; an old goat lady that could only be Toriel, not merely not-smiling but glaring at Asgore like she wanted to murder him with laser vision, or possibly a hatchet; Undyne, oblivious to the drama unfolding behind her back and grinning ferociously despite being fried to a crisp; Alphys, wrapped up in her friend's arms, either sunburned even worse or just blushing like crazy._

_And the human. In the center of the frame, folded into themselves like they weren't so sure about being the focus of attention. Cute smile. Not being caked in dust did wonders for anyone's appearance, but judged purely on their own merits, still a real cute kid. Toriel must've loved them._

_He refolded the photo and framed it flat against the glass, leaving the half with Asgore, Alphys, and Undyne herself facing the Undyne in the tank._ _She made a questioning burble._

_"remember this?" Sans prompted, only to see that he didn't need to. She did not just notice the photo but stared at it, transfixed, as if trying commit the picture to memory just as he did. "or... anybody else who was in it?"_

_"..."_

        was covered in dust, and dust suffused whatever it had that passed for a physical form splattered over the floor. It didn't know whose was whose anymore; Sans was nothing but dust and        lacked the physicality to keep its Determination from burning through the little bit of matter that it did possess, not enough dust inside itself and too much dust in the water... just as much as it needed air or sleep or food, or even more than it needed those things, it knew instinctively what to do, what it had spent its whole existence trying to do, the balance it could not maintain. Dust and magic were what made up a monster. Some third thing, too, but that was less important... it needed more dust.  _More._

_Undyne pulled his wrist until Sans had to all but lie sideways over the mesh over the tank, or risk straining the magic that kept his arm in its socket. "ok, ok, ok, i'm not gonna leave. chill."_

_She ignored him, maintaining a death-grip like one of those wannabe jokesters who thought it was hilarious to go in for a handshake and crunch your fingers. Except with his wrist. Why the wrist? Holding hands would've still felt weird, she technically used to be his boss and all that, but she'd initiated contact and that wasn't what she went for. Wrists were only good for_ really _weird not-handshakes and pulling people somewhere when they wouldn't go under their own power._

_"if you need a hand, that's fine, but i'm gonna need it back at some point, so..." Sans said, the weirdness magnified by how close their faces were to each other. She'd avoided looking at him since he entered the room, but now he was at just the right angle to see her profile. Her jaw clenched, and her eye glowed with the same pinpoint light he had, reflecting in the glass. Sans forgot what he meant to say next. That look in her eye..._

_When he was just a babybones, too little to know a word like "intraosseous" but smart enough to not like the look of a monster with a big ole syringe... and twenty-plus years later, out in the woods with his brother, meeting a dusty human with no sense of humor..._

_...it wasn't a good look. For anybody._

_The discomfort he'd felt since entering this room coalesced into a different kind of fear, condensed, left space for calm thinking, which was what he needed. Later, he'd have the luxury of trying to figure out what the hell was going on here, but until then, he couldn't afford to freak out._ _Fish smelled fear. Wait, could they smell? (Duh, they smelled like fish.)_

_"it's, uh, easily my third-favorite. hand."_

_Luckily for Sans and his goal of not getting turned into bone meal, the long sleeves of his hoodie gave him some extra wiggle room in every relevant sense of the phrase. With just a little twisting around, he managed to slip his hand past the point where she held on, leaving Undyne with a fistful of fabric and nothing else. Good. Step one._

_Step two, whatever it might've been, wasn't in the cards, because Undyne caught onto what he was doing pretty much instantly and tried to yank him down. His shoulder smacked into the grate, but his hoodie provided enough padding to_ _absorb the impact and negate any damage—okay, that was just an assumption, he didn't look, but if he'd been hit hard enough to lose any health then he'd be dying and that seemed like a thing he'd have noticed already. Sans squirmed free of his hoodie (dang, that one was his favorite) and scrambled out of the way like a scared spider._

(Sans woke up. Sort of.

He had been lying on the ground in the dark when he lost awareness. Now here he was, still lying on the ground in the dark. Kinda sore, though. Just how long had he been out?)

        felt a phantom twinge at the back of a neck it didn't really have. A hazy sense that somebody had just been standing over it.

Nothing hurt anymore. Mostly. The burning feeling had not disappeared, but it abated, shifting to a dull, all-consuming warmth; present, but spreading wider, somehow. Almost soothing.        could have fallen asleep, easily, but it also felt the presence of some other monster that it could neither see nor hear.

(Where was he? The lab? Or was he back to whatever non-place he'd thought he was in?)

A voice buzzed through its mind; disoriented, uncertain. A little scared.        was less than a shell of someone else, whose name it couldn't even remember, but it wasn't scared of anything. The voice's fear wasn't its own, even if        wasn't sure what it had just done.

(Undyne attacked him, he saw... someone else... now he was here.

Sans hadn't made any attempt to move yet, which was a level of laziness surprising even to himself under the circumstances. It... didn't seem like he  _could_ , either. Maybe he got cracked on the head harder than he realized.)

Undyne?

(...Undyne?)

The name sounded familiar.

( . . . )

Moments ago,        was on the floor, in a different body, waiting for its brother. It didn't have a brother. That never happened.

        shook itself, or herself. It didn't care about doll-monsters in black cloaks, or the dead. What Sans had, the magic he possessed but _wasted_ , it wanted that. It wanted what he had. What he'd had. Freedom from this nightmare of an existence.

(This was a joke. A nightmare. This wasn't real.)

Realization came. Sans was more concerned about it than        , he laughed brokenly and there was no way to avoid the stream of thoughts intruding on its own, even as he himself tried to hide them and         tried to ignore them, feelings and halfway-nonsensical words overlapping too rapidly and completely for        to have the slightest hope of following even if it wanted:  _this wasn't real this was a joke this was a nightmare she was listening he could hear her why could he hear her she could hear him he felt it she felt it everything she knew she'd know here here forever no it would end it would have to end this couldn't go on this couldn't go real at all this wasn't possible was it no the Amalgamates no this wasn't where were they this wasn't what happened why was he here at all this wasn't real it couldn't be real before he'd been far away he_ _almost got to see his brother someone help someone had to help why did he leave gaster gaster gaster alphys papyrus this was a joke gaster come back please come back do something dad dad dad dad dad help save him don't go please please pleaseplease please come back_

...but nobody came.

Sans went very quiet. His thoughts didn't stop, but they slowed, sank into a rhythm, turned muted. He withdrew to some unobtrusive corner and mumbled nonsense about a fluffy bunny, hoping to block        out from hearing him, even though it still heard him and knew he was there, and he was there and knew        was there and heard her.

Fine.

Before Alphys came back, before something went wrong,        had to get away from here. She wasn't Sans—that other name felt so _familiar_ , and she remembered the last place she'd been, when she was still  _that_ person, was that enough to make them the same? Could        take back whatever she lost there, and be that person again? Sans had a clear memory of what she'd  _looked_ like, and there was the picture he showed her, and memories, memories... ...She wasn't Sans, she wasn't anyone, but for once, they wanted the same thing.

Anywhere would be better than this place,  _anywhere_ , as long as it wasn't this place...

The darkness grew, and the lights, which had still been on all along, dimmed briefly.        was gone.

* * *

* * *

Attacking Alphys and Sans in that elevator was stupid. Stupid, stupid,  _stupid_.

What was he thinking? Well, okay, he knew  _what_ he was thinking; he was thinking about the flowerbed, and Alphys and Sans, and Chara, and that he was angry. The consequences didn't occur to him until later, and without a SAVE file, later meant  _too_ late. But even if he'd succeeded, Chara might have been angrier about losing their toys than about the flowers; they could be unpredictable even before they came back to life, before they actually managed to kill anybody, he never could tell what would make them angry and what they would just laugh off or ignore.

No harm was done to the toys, and chances were good that Chara would never find out how close their little brother came to breaking them, but life wasn't fair, so Flowey's daily life became even more boring and depressing than before, even though he technically didn't do anything bad. Home wasn't safe from intrusion, Alphys and her dumb skeleton buddy  _lived_ in New Home, so that place was a big "no", but Snowdin and Hotland were risky as well. By process of elimination, Flowey was left with Waterfall as a refuge. It was okay as a hiding spot, hardly any monsters were around, but that was also the main problem. There was practically nobody here, and nothing he hadn't seen a million times before.

..Until right about now.

Flowey leaned as far over the bridge as his stem would let him, peering at the blob of goo splattered there like a blob of dirty, melted snow, dotted with shiny bits of broken glass. Extending a vine, he gave the blob a poke, which sent a few droplets slipping between the wood slats and down, down, down. He yanked the vine away and scraped it on the ground to clean it;  _unlike_ snow, the gooey stuff was the exact kind of warm that you didn't want an indeterminate fluid to be. Yeeeeeccchhhh.

"Hey? Hey! Are you still alive, or what?"

The size of the gray puddle _beneath_ the bridge suggested that Flowey's new blob friend had been there for quite some time, melting steadily even without his help. He was  _pretty_ sure it was alive, or at least had been alive at some point, but he'd never actually seen a dead Amalgamate. Did they turn into plain old dust? Goo? Gooey dust? One of their number did live nearby, but she rarely left her pond.

"Lemon Bread? Uh, Cheerybdis?"

"..."

There were other monsters with other names in there, but they'd all Fallen Down before Flowey became Flowey, so he didn't know any of them. Or did he have the entirely wrong person? There was one other fish Amalgamate that once lived in Waterfall, but  _she_ was stuck in a fishbowl the last time Flowey saw her.

"...Undyne?"

The puddle rippled. The floating bits of glass bobbled around, sparkling blue with some kind of clumsily-controlled magic.

"Hah! I knew it. Whatcha doing this far from the lab, Fishstick? Did Alphys finally dump you out?"

It was the logical conclusion of his suspicions about Alphys and Sans: toss the fish out somewhere, let her meet the fate of  _most_ fish that left their tanks, run off and have weird horrible skeleton babies. Seemed heartless even for Alphys, though. In the past, Flowey used to engineer all kinds of scenarios to mess with her, and she never coped too well with anything bad happening to her pal Undyne under _any_ circumstances. Not that Undyne responded much differently when it was Alphys getting thrown around or strangled or whatever. Lots of yelling. Lots of spears. Predictable.

(Maybe Chara was doing the same thing the night before, when they kept RELOADing their file? Flowey never had the chance to toy with humans, but it had to be way better than monsters...)

While Flowey reminisced about timelines past, the magic faded and Undyne went back to whatever she was doing. Or not-doing.

"...No, she wouldn't do that," Flowey mused. "Did you escape, somehow? Golly, won't she be upset when she realizes that you're missing! ...Or not."

"..."

"Hey, wake up!"

"..."

"Undyne?"

"..."

"Come on, this is BORING."

"..."

"Anime is real."

"..."

"Anime ISN'T real!"

"..."

" _Keep ignoring me, and I'll kill your girlfriend. I'll make SURE she dies this time... and I'll do it right in front of you. How does THAT sound?_ "

"..."

Flowey sighed. His twisted leer vanished. Scary faces weren't any fun without an appreciative audience.

"Or maybe... you don't care WHAT happens to her? I understand. Even by MY standards, Alphys messed you up pretty badly... and now she likes somebody else instead."

"..."

"It must hurt to be abandoned like that."

"..."

"Not that I'd know."

"..."

" _Ptttthhhhhhbbbbbbbbbbbt._ "

This was what spending too much time alone in Waterfall did to a person. You started making stupid noises at gross people-puddles, and you couldn't even pretend to have anything better to do with your time.

"Gah!" went Flowey. Not out of frustration, but because two long, skinny arms had just emerged from the puddle. They slid outward, skimming the wood grain of the bridge before finding its edges and pushing down on it, hauling their owner up as if from the depths of a deep pond.

Remarkably, Undyne's little foray out of her tank didn't appear to have hurt her much; on the contrary, she had her ear fins again, some stubby-looking fingers, and even hair, hanging long and ragged. Which she proceeded to shake around like one of her dog buddies drying themselves off, sending gray drops of goo flying all over. Flowey dove underground to keep from getting splattered with the stuff, and by the time he came back up, her hair slid back in place, its ends drip-dripping into the puddle where she sat.

"You really ARE gross, you know."

She slid her fingers over and over her face, as if trying to remold it into a better shape. A splinter of glass, no bigger than the scales she once had, fell down between the cracks in the bridge.

"Though I guess Alphys can't take ALL the blame. After all, she's not the one who thought it would be smart to try and fight Chara. You remember all that, right? In fact, it was right—"

"D...one...?" Her voice, originally a gruff and scratchy contralto, scraped like the glass. It was still more than Flowey would have expected.

"Huh?"

With the solemn clumsiness of a very small kid, she dug her fingers into her shoulder and extracted another bit of glass. She didn't flinch, there was no sign it hurt at all, but she was careful to drop it far away from herself, over the edge. The hole in her skin closed and smoothed over, leaving no scar or trace of injury behind. Not once had she so much as glanced in Flowey's direction.

"Are... y...ou... done."

He scrunched his face, tried to decide whether he should be insulted or not, then smirked. " _Really?_ After all this time... when ALL I've ever tried to do was be friendly... that's ALL you have to say?"

Her fingers curled and uncurled. She leaned forward, bracing against the bridge as if for support.

"..."

"'Cause, you sure don't make it EASY, you kn—"

Undyne pushed off and lunged at Flowey, pouncing on him before he could dodge out of her way. Her hand wrapped around his stem, slimy and wavering like a giant tongue.

"HEY!" he screeched. "What is your PROBLEM?" He tried to pull himself free, but if her grip was any weaker than usual, the Amalgamate goop made up for it. If he managed to slip out, his leaves and petals wouldn't be coming with him, and escape in any other direction wasn't going to happen.

Her face, though it looked a little bit more like the one he remembered, was devoid of expression.

"Al...phys."

"What ABOUT her?"

Each syllable she spoke dragged out, becoming its own word. "Wh..at... di...d... you... do." 

"I didn't do ANYTHING! to her, all right?" said Flowey. "It was just a JOKE, I didn't really mean it!"

He felt the hand tighten, bringing back memories of every flower he'd ever plucked from the soil during his old existence. Vines, those were his best attack, could he toss her over the bridge with them? No, she would hold on and tear him right out of the ground. No good.

"I didn't! I don't care about your dumb girlfriend," he added. "That stuff with Sans, I was KIDDING. She likes you better than him, she watches some WEIRD stuff, she might even like you MORE than she did before... there, are you happy now?"

"...Fuhu...hu...hu..."

Undyne lowered her face toward his own, and he stopped struggling, sensing that it would encourage her to do something he liked even less than this. Chara could RESET him back to life, but it was hard to focus on that when he might get dismembered  _now_... especially with a big set of fangs in such close proximity. And the laughter. It was not a happy laugh, not amusement, for once he couldn't guess what she was thinking, if anything at all. This was nothing like  _any_ of the situations Flowey had set up, in the past, when he was in control. This wasn't how she behaved when someone she was concerned about was in danger.

"Y-you really ARE empty inside, too, aren'tcha? I guess... we really might understand each other. I know what it's like. Really."

With the same slow care she'd used in handling the broken glass, she rested one of her new fingers on a petal.

"...Seriously, why are you looking at me like that?"

"Sa...ns."

"What?"

"D...ead. K...ill...ed. Got... out."

"...What."

Flowey still couldn't move and he wasn't so sure how to get out of this predicament. He also became aware, distantly, that he was making a sound like all the air leaking from a balloon. "Wait, wait, do you mean... you KILLED him? When? _How?_ "

Undyne smiled at him, and her fangs glinted.

The squeaky-balloon noise gave way to a peal of laughter. She was definitely out of her mind by now, completely—not lying, but saying something that only she thought had really happened. But Sans had to know about Undyne, it wasn't impossible for them to have interacted at least once, maybe he'd even tried to pull her out of that tank and... it could ACTUALLY be true. The one monster who'd been the bane of his existence for way too much of his existence, ever since he gave up on playing nice with the NPCs, killed by a brainless undead fish during some uncharacteristic burst of compassion for somebody other than his brother. It _could_ be true, and if it was... Flowey couldn't decide if he was mad that he didn't get to do the honors, or mad that he didn't get to  _watch_.

"Hee!" Flowey giggled. "If you really did, I'm taking back ALL the mean things I've EVER said about you! That's AMAZING."

Undyne watched impassively as the last of his laughter finally drained away. Then her fingers closed around the petal and tore it off, cleanly, in one sharp motion.

Flowey yelped, more in shock than any pain. He tried to pull himself down until his roots burned, but he was stuck in place. "Hey, wait—stop it! HEY! Let go!"

"..."

"Let GO!" 

"Wh...y?"

"I'm not gonna DO ANYTHING, I TOLD you that! And I'm not Sans! That HURT! Let GO!"

Undyne considered him, he could  _feel_ it, and then ripped another petal off. Not so cleanly, this time—yellow shreds clung to her fingers. When she reached for a third, Flowey summoned a burst of magic bullets, but before they touched her, before they even came within two feet of her, they

 

 **[͚̹͙͓̽͂ ̰̖̹̯̠ͣ̇ͭ̾ͯÄ͍̮̞́ͤ͛͂̿ͥͩ ̘̺͆͛B͙͚̳͖̩͊ͮͧ͗͂ ̺͔͈̬̓̽ͭ͋ͅS̹̯̩̹̠̭̀ͣͨ́ ͖͍̮̰͉͒̀̿ͨͥ̅Ọ͇̓ͭͩͮ ̬̱͎̜̯͒̊R̩͍̘̔̂͌̔̾ͮ̋ ̹̥̙͓̒̊̈́̾̋ͦͬB̗̥̂ͩͦ͌̚ ̜̔͛ͫ̄̍̌Ẹ̪͑͆̒ ̺̹̳̥̜̽D̞͐ͨ̇ͧ̌ͧ̚ ̋̆̋ͣͣ]̱̪̋̅̾ͣͩͅ** ̮̬̲̭̬͛ͫ̈́ ̙͇͇͌̔͆ͣ̂ ̬͌ ̠̓̾͒ͩ ̬̝̦̘ͤͯ ͇̘̰̱̹͇͔͗ͯ͛ͪ̅ͧ̋ ̙ͨ̋ ̦̯̑ͮͭͩͥ̓͗ ̘͕ͨ̿̌͋͂ ͎̗̺̦̼̮͍ ͉̘ͧ̃ͦ͂̌ͫ ̥͙ ̌̑̍̅̔ ̣͙͚̣̼̭̄ͦ̐ͩͣ ̮͎͇͇̪͆ͅͅ ͓̩̜̩̰̺ͧ̀ͪ̀͗͒ ̬̫͎̘͂͛͌͊̑̿͗ ͌͂͢  ̈̽ͯ̿ ̫̦̪̖̦͓̭͗ͮ͆ ̦̩̻̂ͨ ͤ͊ͮ ̳̲͎̱̞̗ͪ̔̾́̒ ̞̎̒̃̚ ̜̹͈̟̮͍͎ͦ͊ͭͧ̍ͦ ̬̞̭͙̥͍̗ͫ͊ͤͦ͗ͪ ͆̋̏̑̑ͧ ̜̼͈͚̲͉̲̄͌̎͂ͯ ͔ͯ ̖̟̞̖̥̽͒̂̂̈̒ ͎͈͎̠͎̬ ̲̞̼̠̮̗͍̽ ̖̪̤̩̼̖͌ͮ̏ ̰̉͐̚ ̺͔͐ͤ͂̾͊̍ ̖̲̟̜͓ͧ͆ͭ ̘ͭ̅ͩ̋ ͎̙͍̩ͮ̈́ **[͍̥͉̭͕̌ͩ̐͊ͅ ̩̯̼̩͈̫͊ͦ̒̈́ͮͨ̏n̬̭̬͉̥͓ͨͬ͌ͤ͐̎ ͉͎̦̚o͍̘̣͉͎̎ͨ͗ͬͣ̎ͣ ͎͎͓̟̩̅pͫ͋͑ ̞͇̝̖̞̺͖e͚͙̮ͭͫ ̆̒̽̃]ͦͣ** ̦̠͇̖̻̇ ͖̥͉̻̖̻̌̋ͪͪ́͛̚ ̦̤͉̼̲̒́̑̚ ̳͇ ͍̫̐̓̀͑́͛̒ ̺͕̝̳̱̗͇͊̓ ͕̣̓ ̦̙̿ ̹̈́̆ͩ͊ͬ͑ͥ ̤ͬ̄̿̈́̂ͪ͑ ̰̼ ͍͓̝ ̦̲͔ͯͣ͂̑̚ ̗̙͕̻̙̻̬ ̰̹̰ ̪͉̄͋̽ ̙̣̜̙̜ͪ͆̀̍ͅ ̤̺̼̐ ̫̲͖̦̤͚̣ͨͮͫ ̓̐ ̹͙̭̪̯͊ͩ ̫̮̉̏ͭͦ̿̔̚ ̼͓͎̳̞͔ ̝̜͎́͋ͯͩ̇ ̪͙͂͛̋̒̈ͭͬ ̹̥̼̬̰̺ ͯ͊̏̎̅͌̐ ̱̺̣̒ͥ̈͐̃ ̻̦̞̭̜̂̓̅ **[ͨ͒̀ ̪̀ͥ̽ͤ͋D̬̰̠̏͐ ̙̣̫̲̍̃ͧ̀͋̐I̜͓̖̖̘̺͒ ͍̼͇̩̟̀̓D̤̺͔ ̄N͐̏̆ͣ̾͒̈ ͉̤͇̺̌'͎̫̼͎̫͗ͧ̅ ͤ͛͊̍ͮ͛̐Ṱ̱ ̍ͫ̅͌̾ͤ̚ ̭͕̱̰̝͔̀̐͌̃̇W̦̯ͮ̊͋̄ ̇̿Ǒ̊ͩ͌ ͕̒̊ͪ̃ͬR͊̚ ̲̤͚̋ͫ̌ͯK̪̈͆̍̎̑̄ ̞̱̉͌̋͗͛]̦̣̪ͭ̂͐**

ceased to exist.

Flowey's eyes went wide. No, he'd never seen a dead Amalgamate, not in all the countless times he'd relived the same few weeks or months, and it wasn't disgust or mercy that kept him from it.

...And that was okay, or, not okay but just a temporary problem, something that would go away once his friend came back, or loaded their SAVE file, it was something that they could punish Undyne for later and then laugh off, along with everything else, but

[FILE SAVED]

the smile on Undyne's face twisted, like she knew something he didn't, and it dawned on him, just a little too late, that he was in more trouble than he'd ever imagined.

* * *

* * *

[ can u give me a 2nd opinion ]

[ it's about the vessel... ]

[ and those old tapes + the stuff in the ruins... ]

[ i think i figured it out but i hope im actually wrong? idkkk ]

[ LOLL I SOUND LIKE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST ]

[ but i am serious about this ~_~ ]

[ sans? ]

[ saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaans sanssanssanssnassans ]

[ you have ur phone i KNOW u do . ]

[ ? ]

[ ???? ]

[ ....ASKFJ;GDH I FORGOT hOW LATE / EARLY IT IS ]

[ I'm Stopping Now (⊙﹏⊙);;;;;  gomen ]

 

Alphys threw her phone over to her bed. It bounced off the pillow, hit the wall like a rock, and slid behind the bedframe.

She hugged her knees to her chest. The old royal family, frozen in time within a homemade picture frame of popsicle sticks and glitter, looked down at her with benign smiles and mockery in their eyes. Her scales itched.

If Undyne was still here, if talking to her was an option— _and no, Sans, sign language wasn't going to help_ —what would she do? She had every good quality missing from Alphys, confidence and strength, and a sense of justice that never wavered, but this wasn't a problem that could be solved by finding some bad guys to punch. She might refuse to interact with Alphys for the rest of their respective natural lives, but that wasn't the same thing. Nor was it a solution.

(The space between her temples throbbed, and she couldn't shake off the feeling that she'd been here before, at this moment, thinking these thoughts. But that was silly.)

Alphys went to the dresser and held the photo close enough to touch her snout, looking over the lenses of her glasses. The figures melted into impressionistic blobs of earth colors, sepia and brown, a few smatterings of pale cream. Asgore and Toriel were still recognizable, thanks mostly to Asgore's horns, and Asriel looked like a miniature version of his mom. Chara didn't look like the rest of their family—wow, what a brilliant flash of scientific insight, it wasn't like they were a _completely different freaking species_ _or anything_ —but they did look, just a little, like somebody else.

The short dark hair, the striped shirt, even their height relative to Asgore and their body build... if you obscured the details, or you were just incredibly far-sighted because the universe had a twisted sense of humor, the similarity was striking. Chara and the  _other_ human would never be mistaken for each other if they somehow stood side-by-side, but the resemblance was there if you looked for it.

Until recently, Alphys had no reason to look for it. But she also wasn't the one predicting that Chara would somehow return to finish what the other human started.

_CHARA'S GONNA KILL ALL OF YOU, GO TELL SANS THAT!_

Of _all_ people, those Madjicks came closest to guessing the identity of the being in the RUINS, even if they arrived at it from the completely wrong direction. Alphys wasn't so sure about that ghost thing. But the pieces all fit together. The flower, which helped the last human murder every monster it met, except for the kid Undyne protected and Sans, who the flower hated, that flower believed Chara would come back and wipe out the rest of the Underground. That flower first grew in Asgore's garden, from soil intermingled with Asriel's dust. Alphys injected it with Determination, causing it to gain sapience. Then it ran away to the RUINS and mistook a violent human for a different human that looked like them, and had a darker edge to their personality than anyone but Alphys and the prince ever knew.

Determination, dust... it could be done. Those two elements were all it took to bring Undyne back and see her old smile and talk to her for a little while, before the process inevitably went wrong. Asriel had been dust for longer than Undyne or Alphys were even alive, but the concept was the same. The outcome, too, because unless Asgore did a  _lot_ of lying to make his children sound better, the flower didn't turn out to be anything like the prince.

No wonder it was so angry.

Alphys set the photo down, sliding her glasses back into place. Her realization about the flower-prince was like an extra twist of the knife while already bleeding to death; it didn't tell her anything she didn't already know about herself, and it didn't give any extra insight into dealing with the flower-prince. Technically, he was the rightful heir of the monster kingdom, but he'd also helped "Chara" murder his father and Mettaton and Undyne, and then he personally tried to kill three other people, Alphys herself included, so stepping down and letting him take over might possibly not be the best idea. She didn't want to hurt the prince, but then, she wasn't crazy about the idea when she thought he was just a flower. What she did or didn't want was irrelevant.

She crawled under her bed to retrieve her phone, which now rested in a clump of dust much bigger than any bunny. There was no reply from Sans, but that was nothing unusual. He almost never answered his phone at night.

In the morning, Sans would come back so they could check in on Undyne, and Alphys could give her the next injection. Later, they could compare notes on the flower. Alphys even had the beginnings of a plan in mind, for dealing with it, though she'd put the idea on hold as soon as she had her little revelation about its identity. Robots, modeled after that mole monster in the Core, scampering between vines and wires with their goofy little headlamp. Everyone knew what small burrowing animals could do to flowers. ...Well, it wasn't her best idea, but it wasn't her worst.

The cloud of anxiety lifted. Not completely, not even a lot, but enough for her to feel a bit better. Even her headache wasn't too bad anymore. She had a plan, or something close to one, and she had a friend to help her.

Later, after she'd turned out the lights and burrowed beneath the blankets, Alphys wondered how Asgore would have reacted to the truth about the flower. It was  _his_ child; as angry as Undyne might have been, he had every right to be angrier, but... it was his child. Maybe he would have thrown Alphys in jail, but he still would have loved the flower. Did it realize that? Did it even care..?

 

 

Sans didn't come back.

Alphys dressed and paced through the castle. She started a sketch of her new robot design, but couldn't concentrate. She checked her phone and picked the awkward spots between her fingers where strips of old scales clung on. She paced some more.

[ psssssst ]

[ sorry about blowing up your phone. i rly forgot >___< ]

[ where r u? ]

Technically, she didn't _need_ him to get into the lab. Technically, she just  _wanted_ to borrow his power, because it made life easier, easier as in, she wouldn't have to find a way to either fix the elevator in less than a couple hours, or find some way to climb down like Cabbage, who'd ripped a vent cover off the wall—oh, thanks, Cabbage!—and climbed through the air duct. And she wouldn't meet whatever terrible end the flower-prince wanted her to suffer, the first time he attacked, if by chance he was waiting for her there.

So, no, it wasn't exactly Sans'  _job_ to help. And judging by how Undyne used to complain about her friend Papyrus' lazy brother, he didn't care much about his job(s), anyway. But while he was napping serenely away somewhere, holed up in a closet or behind an old sentry station, Undyne waited and melted and had every reason to be starving, since she couldn't just hop out of her tank and visit the vending machine while Sans hibernated. Alphys wasn't sure anymore if she even needed to eat; she refused almost everything offered to her, and suffered no ill effects. Sans knew his help was  _wanted_ , and if he was so uncomfortable with being involved in the Determination treatments, he'd been given an opportunity to bail out. He had no reason to not be back when he said he would be.

The minutes crawled past and piled up and died. An hour accumulated.

Alphys tried to call during that time, but reached only his voicemail, indicating that he'd gone somewhere without a signal or turned off his phone.

She wasn't one to think badly of her friends, except in the obscure sense that she always suspected they either secretly hated her or would have hated her if only they could see through the facade and discover the real Alphys. Even Sans, who could be just as cagey as Alphys herself, never went out of his way to hurt anyone. But Undyne was desperately unhappy, so much so that even easygoing, perceptive Sans kept complaining about it, as if Alphys wasn't equally uncomfortable with the situation. The night before, he'd asked her about finding a way to communicate, one that  _he_ conveniently happened to know. Later, after they'd gone home, he quietly crept back out when he must have thought Alphys was asleep.

Only two places in the Underground were consistently without a signal: the Core, and the basement lab. Sans never went to the Core for any reason. And just a few days ago, he'd suggested moving Undyne from the lab and into Waterfall...

"W-what do you think you're _doing?_ " Alphys mumbled to the empty screen on her phone. (0 new messages. Naturally.)

Her scales stung.

Sans had read all her notes, and he'd heard Alphys say, over and over, that Undyne  _could not be let out_. The situation being bad did not mean that a better alternative existed, as much as they all might have wanted one.

Only, that was exactly what she'd told him about all the  _other_ Amalgamates...

~~[ if youre doing sthing stupid i swear i'm  ]~~

~~[ sans are you ]~~

~~[ DONT ]~~

She typed out new messages, deleted them, put away the phone. She'd wasted too much time waiting around already.

* * *

"Tra la la. Tre le le. With a SOUL full of perseverance... pie can be for every meal. Why not invite a friend or two?"

The boat swayed as Alphys stepped up onto the dock. "Thanks..?"

"But, too much calcium... can have unexpected side effects, so I've heard. Best to be careful..."

She didn't have a good response for those parting words, if one was even wanted. The Riverperson hummed tunelessly while their boat drifted into the distance. Okay, then.

 

A soft breeze drifted over the border between Waterfall and Hotland.

Undyne pointed it out once, a long time ago now, and Alphys, still petrified by this ridiculously attractive person who kept finding reasons to talk to her despite an irredeemably awful first impression, gave her a rambling lecture about air pressure and humidity. High-pressure air moved toward wherever the pressure was lower, which would be Hotland because the air there was, well,  _yeah_ , whereas Waterfall was always damp and cool, which made the air denser. So it moved and that was basically a miniature version of what took place on the surface, and if this room was many times larger, the water in the air could condense into rain clouds. Like, actual weather. Except it wasn't because they were all underground, so that became an argument over semantics and philosophy or something, which Undyne didn't care about, and why was Alphys thinking about this right now, she had no reason whatsoever to be thinking about this.

Alphys closed her eyes to steady herself, then realized she was about to walk into a wall, which would not be cute. She held the vial that usually hung from her neck, its cord wound around her fingers so there would be no possibility of her dropping it. A set of clean syringes sat in the dimensional box paired with her phone.

As she passed into Waterfall proper, she heard a barely-contained sob from the cavern ahead. Though the pain in it was instinctively recognizable, she couldn't tell what kind of person it could have come from— old, or young, or male, or female, or something else entirely. The last time she had been in this sort of position, following an unknown voice, she'd had the benefit of three competent magic-users at her side, but she didn't have much time now to be scared of what she might encounter.

"U-Undyne!"

Alphys rushed over. At the end of the bridge crouched her friend; head down, hair falling veil-like around her face. Alphys saw but did not have time to consider how she looked different now, starting with the fact that she had hair at all. Undyne had to have been out of her tank for hours now, but she now did not resemble a melting approximation of herself so much as her actual self, her normal appearance, dipped in wet and dripping paint. By itself it seemed like an improvement, but then, Undyne looked nearly normal in the very beginning, when she first came back, before she...

Undyne looked up, calmly, through the curtain of her hair. A flower was in front of her, a ring of gray pooled around its partially-exposed roots. The gray liquid dripped periodically from her fist, and the flower's stem stretched taut between where she held it and where it sprouted up from the ground.

The flower twisted around as best it could. Its remaining petals were ragged, the gaps between them bleeding sap, and its improbable little face was stained with tears.

"A-Alphys! _Alphys!_ " it wailed. "Help me, p-please, she's, she KILLED your friend Sans, she's—d-don't let her — _MAMA, HELP ME!_ "

If the plea was supposed to drive Alphys into immediate action, it didn't work. She froze. At most, she thought she might see Sans, or someone who had seen him or Undyne, not... not whatever this tableau even was. Her first priority was to protect her friend from a dangerous creature to the best of her limited abilities, but the flower in her hand seemed no more threatening than a normal flower. Even its, or rather,  _his_ blatant appeal to her emotions—did he just call her  _that_? And did he just bring up Sans like that,  _seriously?_ —sounded more like a scared Whimsun's desperate apologies than manipulation. He didn't even know that  _she_ knew who he was.

Alphys knelt down and edged closer, agonizingly slow. "Wh-what's going on? Did Sans bring you out here, by yourself..?"

The breeze rustled past. Undyne lowered her head, as if they were both still in the lab, with water and thick glass between them. The flower sniffled.

"Um. Ahh... I don't... know how you got here? But if you stay, it... won't be good. So, let's just, go back, and... forget about whatever Sans thought he was doing. It'll be safer, and... y-you should feel better too! It'll just be for a little while..."

"..."

Undyne almost seemed like she might say something, before she caught sight of the vial Alphys still held. She went rigid, or as close to that as she could get, in her condition. In a burst of frantic motion, Asriel slipped free from her grasp and disappeared. Alphys supposed that should have worried her, but he was already so badly mangled that she wasn't sure how much longer he could survive, let alone hurt anyone.

Speaking of which...

Undyne put her now-empty hand down to support herself, wobbling a little. Gray droplets trickled down the side of her face, down her shoulders. The ends of her hair dripped like candle wax.

"...Undyne?!"

"...D...on't. Not... g...onna... die," she rasped, and then did something she hadn't done for weeks: she  _laughed_ , brokenly. "Not... going... ba...ck." It should have been a breakthrough, but that was what Alphys thought in the very beginning, when she first came back, talking and smiling...

"I'm sorry. I know it hurts a lot, and you're n-not happy, but if we don't use this and go back, y-you'll... ...you WILL die."

There wasn't much Determination in the vial she'd kept with her—just enough to stabilize her friend, keeping her alive for the time it would take to fix whatever had gone wrong—just like the last time. She'd never anticipated that they might be this far from the tank, but maybe it could last long enough. It had to last.

Alphys began to unseal the vial. Undyne shook her head. " _No_."

"I'm just going to... um, help get you back there? And we can f-fix this. I don't know what Sans th-thought he was doing, or why that flower was bothering you, but..."

"Not... going... ba...ck. ...We... can't... go back. H-heh..."

Her hands were shaking. As frustrating and frankly  _stupid_ as he'd been for the past day, she wished he was here now. With his help, they could be back at the lab in an instant... but instead he'd left Undyne here alone, where the flower might find her, at the very edge of Waterfall. Typical.

"A... all right, it's all right," She said. "We don't, h-have to use it... right away, b-but we  _need_ to go back. Or else... don't you remember?" Maybe she didn't. Alphys almost hoped she didn't, except that would make this even harder.

She put the vial away, then turned up her empty hands. Undyne pulled away.

"I'm s-sorry. I'm... r-really sorry. I can't tell you how much. All I want is... for you to b-be okay..."

"Not, go...ing... back."

"But... we have to. I'm not happy either. Can't you tell?"

Whatever frustration Undyne had been taking out on the flower was gone. Even her refusals now didn't sound angry, or harsh, or stubborn. She looked... sad, unsure of something.

Alphys couldn't wait any more. She scooted forward on her knees, onto the bridge, trying as best she could to ignore how far they were from the cavern floor, and gingerly slid her arms around her friend's damp shoulders; Undyne leaned away, but didn't push her off. When life was still the way it was supposed to be, Undyne thought it was hilarious, that little Alphys was strong enough to carry her around. They could go back to the lab that way, or even a river, somewhere. Anywhere with water. Alphys could find a way to fix this—keep her alive, and do whatever it took to keep her that way. Undyne was  _talking_ to her, she was too scared to fully appreciate it but she was present and not just pretending or hoping that Alphys didn't exist, once they were somewhere safer they could... they could...

Her arms tightened around Undyne, exerting only the slight pressure necessary to pick her up. But then she was gone, literally pouring down to the bridge and past it, between the gaps in its wooden slats, falling.

Alphys gasped and scrambled to the edge, too late to stop her, too late to do anything. Far below the bridge, in shadow, the stone floor of the cave rippled like the surface of a subterranean lake; the ripples spread out wide, unfolding and then smoothing, the dark water turning placid. Then it was just rock. It had always been rock, nothing else, with no sign that water or dust or a monster had ever been there.

Her claws sank into the damp wood as she pushed herself back, huddled at the edge of the bridge, staring past it and into nothing.

The air was still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hooo boy. This chapter. I was looking forward to it, but once I got here, I just got so. Completely. Stuck. If anyone following this story is annoyed at how slowly I update it, I can promise I'm even more frustrated--in theory I could get a chapter out every 7-10 days or so, but I can only really write on the weekends, so you see the issue.
> 
> On a less negative note, I'm planning to post the first chapter of the follow-up fic alongside the last chapter for this one because it makes chronological sense, buuut I may get impatient and just post chapter 10 first. It's a mystery!


	10. This World Will Live On

ENTRY NUMBER 01:

* I thought it would help to call them.  
* Being able to say what I feel, even if it’s too late to act…  
* It did help, for a while.  
* Just not enough.

* * *

Alphys knocked on the door and stepped back, her heels pressed into the edge of the front step. She readjusted the strap of her duffel bag, leaning awkwardly to counterbalance the weight on her hip, and wiped her hands on her jeans. At the other end of the street, a dog barked.

She watched herself with a distant, clinical curiosity, the way she’d once watched other monsters going about their lives from behind her monitor. (For, um, scientific research? Wasn’t sociology also a kind of science??) The Alphys-on-the-screen had spent the night hunched over her old notes from the lab, the old ones about the Amalgamates and the newer ones about Undyne, comparing her findings, cross-referencing all of it with that long-neglected list on her laptop which detailed every monster that had recently Fallen Down. If she rushed through her work, she'd have another disaster on her hands, and if she waited too long, all her efforts would be for nothing. It would all be very tense and scary, if she cared what happened to her if something went wrong. But she didn't care, and she didn't feel like trying to make herself care.

It was a liberating feeling. Being detached, like this, just playing the role of somebody that cared. Maybe that was why Sans acted how he always did.

The door opened. A moth monster with enormous eyes and a bruised face was inside. Experience alone was what told her that the moth monster was a moth, and not some other kind of bug; they had no wings. A small, sparkly ribbon was tied in a neat bow around one antenna.

“Er, hello,” they said, like they were trying to sound polite, but not hard enough to _not_ sound like they were trying. “What do y—” They stopped mid-word, a slightly horrified expression on their face. It was both kind of funny and theoretically kind of insulting, until they shrank back deferentially and Alphys realized that they just hadn’t recognized her. To be fair, except for a few monsters passing by on some early-morning errands, they were the first person to see her walking around in something other than a lab coat or a robe since she became the royal scientist.

“Hi. Can I come in?”

“Y-yes. Of course, your majesty,” Cabbage stammered. They backed away to make space for her in the small front room, then winced and put a hand against the wall for support.

Alphys cringed in instinctive sympathy, fixating on the ribbon to avoid staring at the layers of white bandages visible through their thin dress. But that just made them blush through the fuzz on their cheeks and pull the ribbon off, bunching it up to hide in their fist.

“Why did you leave the hospital so soon?” Alphys asked. She scrubbed her hands on a corner of her shirt, but the black grease was all under her nails.

Instead of an answer from Cabbage, she heard a distant, rushing buzz, like static electricity overlaid with frantic giggling. Where there’d been nothing, a bird-shaped monster as big as she was hung in the air over the kitchen table. Its head extended at right angles, snaking up and sideways and then next to her; its body followed the same zig-zagging course, long neck retracting into the body like a tape measure. The two halves of its beak separated, spun around, and reattached in a flipped position.

“YoWhRibuatbitsmdoyellou,walinirtke,Almotophroybbit?os?il.” it said. The sounds came from multiple directions, none of them anywhere near the beak.

“Oh. H-hey, Reaper Bird.”

In a cloudy puff, they disappeared and sprinkled over the floor and then oozed out of the wall where Cabbage leaned, so that they now leaned against its wing. Cabbage gave the wing a pat and tried to stand up straighter.

“I had to be sure they are all right. I don’t trust the others to look after them for long,” they said, glancing back toward the hallway. They lowered their voice, like they were afraid the other monsters they lived with might be listening, and added: “I never told anyone about the other Amalga— Amalgamate while I was there. I promise you.”

Maybe this all would have ended differently if they had. “I know. Um. Thanks.” Alphys shifted the bag to her other shoulder. “Your little sibling is… alive, aren’t they..?”

Cabbage smoothed an invisible wrinkle from their dress.

“...Y, yes. Lace… is alive. I was going to go back to see them shortly. They... don’t like places that are bright and noisy. It frightens them.”

“Okay, great! Ahh, n-not the scared part, I mean, um, I have something for them.”

Alphys untied the cord from around her neck and pulled it up, sliding the glass vial out from under her shirt. Cabbage gaped, the red light of the Determination reflecting in their giant bug eyes. She held the vial out to them, then felt terrible—so much for total apathy—because Reaper Bird dissolved back into the wall and fled with an electronic screech. Cabbage lurched and fell with an agonized squeak, but waved her away when she rushed over to help. Almost before they got back up, they snatched the vial from her hands and cradled it protectively to their heart.

“Wh-where did this come from?" they gasped, either from pain or shock. Alphys just hoped that they wouldn't fall over again, and crack the vial, and end up granting sapience to a floorboard. "How..?”

She took in the disbelieving happiness on their face and waited to feel something. “Didn’t you already figure it out in the lab?”

“…Oh,” Cabbage said. She waited, masochistically, for them to ask about the other monster they’d met down there, whose hoodie she now had on, streaked with dirt and grease from a climb through an elevator shaft. But they were too busy trying not to hyperventilate. Well, soon enough, the whole Underground would hear some version of the story.

“They must be pretty young, and, um, not much bigger than you are. So they would definitely be eligible, as long as the doctors don’t think my plan is completely bad. But, after what happened to you, all because of what I’ve been doing… I thought it was fair for you to know first.” She shifted her bag to her other shoulder. “Though, just to warn you, I still don’t, ah… really know if this will work? I think I have a closer estimate to what the right range of doses should be in order to help, depending on the amount of physical matter in a particular monster’s body, but there's no way to tell if it worked unless we do it and it works, and the last time I tried, it didn't, ah... it didn't.

…Um! But, also! As you know, I used to be the royal scientist, and I built all kinds of things long before then. So, so I thought, once you’ve fully healed, I could make some kind of prostheses for you, if you want. You know, like, new wings? They won’t look exactly the same as natural ones, but you’ll be able to fly. If y-you want.”

“…Why would I NOT want that?” Cabbage realized what they said and how they said it, and covered their mouth while they screamed internally. It was a familiar feeling. “I, I mean, th-thank you, your majesty, thank you, I don’t know what I could do for you in return for your kindness, but, but..!”

“You don’t have to do anything. That isn’t why I’m here. Or. Ah…” she smiled a little, ruefully. “Eheh-heh… maybe that isn’t true. To be honest, I’m a little scared to go back to that hospital by myself, even though I know I have to. So, um, maybe we could go together? I could carry you.”

They seemed like the type of person to be insulted by that kind of offer, and maybe they were, but not enough to stop them from frantically nodding as they hugged that vial of Determination. Gently, she scooped them up and set them onto her shoulder.

“Uh, s-sorry for upsetting Reaper Bird just now,” Alphys said.

“They’ll understand. It was an accident.”

Cabbage swayed with the motion of her arm as she opened and closed the front door. The dog at the end of the street had stopped barking. “…What is in this bag?” They leaned down to touch the strap, hissed, and sat stiffly back up.

“…If you don’t know yet… you’ll see, soon.”

* * *

Nobody murdered Alphys or anything. Well, none of the doctors she talked to, since there was still time for some disgruntled family member to hear from a doctor and take the news a lot worse than Cabbage did, and snap her neck for lying to everyone  _again_ , or for killing and/or horribly mutating someone they cared about, if they gave the go-ahead to try reviving them and it didn't work right. Again. But she felt okay by the time she got home, as much as she could feel anything. Tired, but not a bad kind of tired, and now the bag over her shoulder wasn’t weighed down by all the Determination left in the Underground.

At the windowsill, a small yellow bird perched and pecked single-mindedly at the glass. She heard it before she saw it. _Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap._

“Um… hi?”

The bird stopped mid-peck. It picked up a small object that had also been sitting on the windowsill, glided down to Alphys’ hand, and dropped the object—a sheet of torn notebook paper folded into quarters—onto her palm.

“You brought this for me?” she asked. The bird proudly fluffed up its feathers. Behind it, the window was clouded with scratches.

With the hand that did not have anyone sitting on it, she slowly unfolded the paper. Inside was a note:

_Alphys—_

_Your friend didn’t want me to reveal where she is, so out of respect for her wishes, I won’t spill the beans. However, considering how & why I suspect she got here, it seemed only right to let you know what’s what._

_Undyne showed up four days ago. She’s stayed here since then & though I’m no expert on her particular condition, I’ve looked after her as well as I can. Neither of us have keeled over yet, so I must not have it too wrong. _

_That’s the best news I have to tell you, I’m afraid, but I figure it’s what you’d most care to hear._

_There’s another reason behind my decision to write to you, however. You’re a bright gal & capable of tracking Undyne down real quick, with or without my help. You may be trying already. Well, I can’t prevent that, & it ain’t my place to pass judgment on you, Undyne, or the poor SOUL she says that she hurt, but I’ve experienced enough to know that she needs time to work through some things before seeing you again. Maybe I’m overstepping, but perhaps the same is true in reverse._

_(And if that ain’t convincing enough… if you show up on my doorstep with this note in hand, she’ll have my hide! Wa ha ha!)_

_Anyhow. Take care of yourself, kid._

The thin, wobbly, curly script brought to mind a letter from three hundred years ago. The notebook paper and the sender’s decision to literally write out “ha ha”, not so much. Alphys turned over the note, but nothing was written on the back; no further explanation, no name. But its author was right, because she really didn’t know what more she might have hoped or expected to see. Even the things that they did say weren’t _all_ new to her.

A lump formed in her throat without warning. She folded the note back up. “Th…thank you.”

The yellow bird chirped, satisfied with itself, and flew off somewhere. Alphys dragged the sleeve of her hoodie across her face, not caring that it smelled like it had never been washed. Knowing its original owner, it definitely hadn’t.

Sans, whatever he did in that lab and however he came into possession of a photo of the human and the queen and himself and Alphys and all their friends, was dead. Undyne was… she was _alive_ , but somewhere else, and she hated Alphys, and Alphys was alone. It was enough to push some former version of herself into doing something awful and cowardly, with all her fears rolled up together and coming true all at once, but… those comatose monsters in the hospital needed help, and she was (unfortunately) the closest thing to an expert on the one thing that could still save them. Without enough reason to feel hope for the future, more monsters would keep meeting that same fate, and there wasn’t even enough Determination to save every person that had already Fallen. The flower was still a potential risk; the possibility of another human entering the Underground and wiping everyone out, a greater one. And she’d promised to start fitting Cabbage for a set of prosthetic wings, once their injuries healed…

Alphys slipped the note into her hoodie pocket and went back inside the castle.

* * *

* * *

Monster Kid wheezed as two feet slammed down onto their back. Sis wasn’t so heavy, but she had talons just like Dad's and they were like _crazy_ sharp.

“H-hey!” they whined. “Get—ungh—OFF!”

“Ewwwwww, are you watching, like, _politics?_ ” Sis dug her talons in deeper while Monster Kid squirmed. “…Hey, whatsa matter, fart-face?”

“You’re breaking my spine!”

“Are you callin’ me fat?! I’m telling our parents that you called me fat. They’re gonna be maaaa-aaaad~!”

“I didn’t! Yo, you’re the one that broke my spine and called me a—” Sis pushed off and jumped, straight up in the air. Monster Kid saw their chance and rolled away like a log, but they moved all crooked and their head bonked into the corner of a bookshelf so they _literally_ saw stars. And something hard was jabbing into their back now, so getting away didn’t even fix anything.

Sis hit the floor butt-first and squawked. “Ow, what the HELL!”

“Why do you keep doing that, dude?”

“Pttthhhb. How about you try and MAKE me stop?” Sis leaned over to punch Monster Kid in the stomach, then saw the remote sticking out from under them. So instead she just poked them in the ribs to make them move, then snatched the remote away. “…Whatever, I wanna watch anime.”

They sat up, shaking their head around to make the living room stop spinning. Sis changed the channel and flopped onto a beanbag chair in a big puff of feathers. On the TV screen, two human-like girls with witch hats and fluffy at paws were shooting energy beams at each other. Monster Kid could maybe get Sis in trouble for using a bad word, or for watching a show with fighting in it while their parents were out, or walking on them, but they weren’t really mad and they would be even less mad by the time they got the chance. Tattling was pretty lame, anyway.

Monster Kid stretched their feet out in front of them. Laser noises and squeaky yelling came from the TV.

Sometimes—not that they ever TOLD her this, ‘cause she would just take it as an invitation to hog the remote even MORE than she did now—sometimes it felt really good to argue with Sis, even though she always won because she was bigger and older and had more limbs and stuff. At school, the other kids weren’t, like, _mean_ , but Monster Kid could never get rid of the feeling that they were being stared at or whispered about whenever they weren’t looking, even though the thing that happened was way before the new school year started. And twice a week, they had to see this doctor lady who asked about their feelings and school and stuff while they sat on the floor and played with modeling clay or tried to put together a jigsaw puzzle. They didn't really get the point of going, but it was because of happened that summer.

The doctor lady said it was okay to say whatever they were thinking, and that it wasn’t bad or wrong to feel a certain way, but Monster Kid’s parents got upset when they talked about _it_ , almost like they were mad at them, so they didn’t. But it was, like, a complete real fact that if they hadn’t been so stupid, and they listened when Undyne told them to go home instead of following that human kid, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt from protecting them and she wouldn’t have died. And since the human was evil, she could’ve taken their SOUL and used it to free everyone, and they would all be on the surface and happy and nobody else would’ve gotten killed. So they were glad they got saved because they didn’t want to die or get hurt, and even thinking about what the human almost did to them made them feel scared even though it was so long ago, but when Monster Kid thought about all the good stuff that would’ve happened if Undyne didn’t sacrifice herself to save them, sometimes, they secretly deep down wondered if it would’ve been better if…

…Anyway, their parents didn’t like it when they said anything even a little like that, and the other kids maybe whispered about them and maybe didn’t, and their grades at school kind of sucked, and the puzzle lady was okay except that talking to her was a reminder of how nothing was exactly the same anymore. Except for Sis, who still jumped on Monster Kid and called them a fartface.

The episode ended. Either they just spaced out for that long or it was just almost over anyway, but colorful credits were scrolling across the screen. Sis switched back to the channel Monster Kid had been watching; the new queen, Alphys, was talking into a microphone with her hands behind her back while a bunch of monsters from the capitol listened.

She was talking about being determined, or something. Monster Kid couldn’t follow it that much even from the start, and then they got all distracted by Sis like practically breaking their spine and then changing the channel, so now they were lost. They wiggled their feet around.

“Why were you watchin’ this, anyway?” Sis asked.

Monster Kid shrugged like they didn’t know, or anyway they kind of shrugged, since they weren’t that good at it. It wasn’t totally honest, since it was like saying they didn't know and they actually did, but it was too hard to put the actual real truth into words. It wasn’t that they _liked_ watching, but if something really, really bad happened, Alphys would be the one to tell everybody and tell them what to do, since she was in charge, so if she didn’t do that, then nothing bad happened, and the only way Monster Kid could know that she hadn't done that was if they watched. And if nothing really bad happened, and the human was gone and they stayed gone, then maybe what Monster Kid did wasn’t so bad. Or, it was bad, but not the most-bad that it could be. Or maybe that made no sense at all.

Sis turned off the TV and tossed the remote aside. It clattered on the floor and one of the batteries rolled out, but she didn’t notice.

“Well, whatever,” she said. She got up and she poked Monster Kid in the ribs with one of her talons, but not quite so hard this time. “Wanna go play outside?”

"...Yeah, okay."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting now, I'm going to try and keep author notes to a minimum, because they're probably annoying and everything I say I specifically plan to do turns out to be a big lie, lol. So, uh, first chapter of the sequel fic is getting posted whenever it gets posted. If you want to read it once that happens, you know where to find it.
> 
> It feels a little silly to make a huge fuss about finishing a fic, especially one that's fairly obscure, but this (or, technically its awful first draft) is the first story I've actually written despite years of being too scared to write and then feeling like this one isn't as good as I wanted it to be, plus the whole "it's the year of our lord 2018/2019 who would want to read this Undertale fanfic of mine" thing, so finishing feel pretty special.
> 
> Thanks for reading. (And thanks to Khalliys especially, for being nothing but really kind and encouraging ever since I started. ;u; )


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